Three men jailed for rape in Oxford after victim sees film on mobile.

5. Police cuts will leave public less safe, federation warns.

6. Pope Benedict XVI’s whistlestop visit to Britain.

7. Fears for public health grow as Department of Health culls experts.

Unit 4

NEWSPAPER ARTICLES: GRAMMAR AND SYNTAX

Grammatical features of newspaper articles

Newspaper articles are characterised by the following grammatical peculiarities.

1. Verbal constructions (infinitive, participial, gerundial):

To trap men in the not-inconvenient rut of being undomesticated will, in the longer term, only narrow women’s option;

Asked about Cameron and chancellor George Osborne, Johnson said: “I want to be able to talk to them.”

2. Infinitive complexes, especially nominative ones to avoid mentioning of the source of information. Something / somebody is alleged (known; revealed; said; believed; reported; thought, etc.) to do something:

David Cameron is unlikely to be impressed by the way Johnson has attempted to distance himself from the Conservative-led government this week.

3. Attributive groups of nouns (the so-called stone wall constructions) comprising from two to three and more nouns.

The one-billion-pound-a-year pig farming industry is in crisis;

But David Willetts, the Conservative universities minister…

4. The Possessive (Genitive) case with names of countries, cities, areas, enterprises, firms, time of day, etc.: today’s weather; this hour’s headlines; Britain’s industry; Rover’s future instead of corresponding adjectives (British industry) or combinations of nouns with of-preposition (the future of Rover):

In his response to the government’s consultation, Johnson said …

“The high number of teenagers killed on London’s streets so far this year is an example of where no progress has been made.”

Syntactical features of newspaper articles

Newspaper articles list the following syntactical peculiarities.

1. Complex sentences made up of several subordinate clauses:

Johnson today said he had waited until now because he wanted to look at his record in office into his four-year term before making a final declaration, admitting that there had been a “certain amount of nail-biting” over his flagship bike hire scheme, which was launched in the summer to popular acclaim.

2. Compound sentences with a developed system of dependent clauses:

Johnson’s campaign plans are already under way, it emerged today, with fundraising plans and key team members in place, including Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby, who was enlisted on Johnson’s 2008 mayoral campaign;

Bale, 45, who is the subject of an RSPCA investigation and is said to live just half a mile from the scene of the cat’s 15-hour incarceration in Coventry, told the Sun that she did “not deserve to be hated” for her moment of madness.

3. News article is usually broken up into a number of paragraphs with a sentence standing for a new paragraph. It makes the article easier to perceive and understand:

Enormous inefficiencies within the public sector make it plausible for a large reduction in its cost to be achieved with a minimal impact upon the standards of service it offers;

That would require senior managers to identify savings that do not hit frontline capacity but instead reduce non-essential activities and raise productivity.

4. Special word order (Who? – What? – Why? – How? – Where? – When?) or Subject – Predicate – (+Object) – Adverbial modifier of reason (manner) – Adverbial modifier of place – Adverbial modifier of time:

Control Questions

1. What are grammatical properties of newspaper articles?

2. Name syntactical peculiarities of newspaper articles.

3. Why is the Possessive Case widely used in newspaper writing?

Practical Tasks

Task 1.Read the article below, analyse its lexical, grammatical and syntactical features.

Cronyism alert on plan for more people’s peers

Sarah Hall

Tony Blair is expected to prompt renewed charges of cronyism in the new year by appointing his first batch of “people’s peers” since the general election. Five of the non-party political peers will be announced in the Queen’s new year honours list, with a further five appointed in March or April and an additional five in July or August, according to a source close to the House of Lords Appointments Commission.

The staggered effect should ensure the prime minister avoids the embarrassment of the entire list reading like a roll call of establishment figures – at a time when elements of the House of Lords will already be furious over legislation designed to abolish the remaining 92 hereditary peers. In addition, the next batch of working peers will be announced by early December. A total of 20 Labour peers, six Conservatives and four or five Liberal Democrats will be on the list.

Ministers, all too aware that the forthcoming bill to abolish the remaining hereditary peers will be angrily received, will hope the introduction of new Labour peers should help to redress the balance. But it is with the resurrection of the people’s peers scheme that the prime minister risks brooking the most controversy.

The government suffered severe embarrassment when the first, and so far only, set of peers, announced in April 2001, consisted exclusively of establishment figures.

The bemusement directed at the government led to the scheme being apparently put on hold. But on the last day of the recent parliamentary session, Mr Blair announced that the seven-strong Appointments Commission would again be charged with “finding people of distinction who would bring authority and expertise to the House of Lords.”

Last night, Lord Strathclyde, the Conservative leader in the Lords, said he favoured the introduction of new working peers, since around 75 hereditaries had died in the three and a half years since the last announcement. But he warned that resurrecting the people's peers scheme should not be a means of shying away from complete reform of the House of Lords or of installing cronies.

The Guardian, November 10, 2003

Task 2. Read the article below. What sphere of public life does it reflect?

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 814