Abstract:

Today, we live in a peacefully developing world, but the occurrences of natural disasters are still unavoidable. And thus the news reports on these disasters are frequently found in various newspapers. With the advancement of modern media information, the public have a strong desire to learn about the natural disasters happening all over the world. Not only do they want to learn about the truth of the disasters by reading news reports, but also they pay close attention to how media achieve an exact and vivid account of the natural disasters. In this paper, the author has collected 15 news stories about natural disasters from English news papers，including New York Times, China Daily, People’s Daily, and then discussed these reports’ stylistic features from the angles of lexicology, syntax and semantics. Knowing these stylistic features about such news stories is useful for us to understand, enjoy and write this type of news.

Keywords: natural disaster; English news reports; stylistic features

摘  要：

当今，虽然我们生活在一个和平发展的世界，但是自然灾难仍会不可避免的发生，因此对这些灾难的新闻报道也就如影随形的出现了。随着现代媒体资讯的不断进步，公众产生了强烈的欲望去了解发生在世界各地的自然灾难。他们不仅仅想要通过阅读新闻报道了解灾难的真相，而且对媒体如何更加确切，更加形象的论述新闻报告有着广泛的关注。本文从纽约时报，中国日报和人民日报上收集了15篇关于自然灾难类的新闻报道，拟从词汇、句法和语义角度来探讨这些报道的文体特征。了解有关这些新闻报道的文体特征有助于我们对该类新闻的理解、欣赏和撰写。

关键词：自然灾难；英语新闻报道；文体特征

1 Introduction
Today, we are living in the era of information. With the improvement of news reports, linguists are interested in analyzing these reports linguistically, including economic news reports, entertainment news reports and military news reports and so on. They have studied news texts from different angles and have made a lot of findings. Nevertheless, few scholars have explored the stylistic features of natural disaster news texts. Therefore, this paper is intended to make such a study, which aims to help the readers to gain a better understanding of the English news reports on natural disasters. This study has the following significance: First, it can broaden the purview of the linguistic study of news reports; Second, it can help the readers more quickly extract the most vital information of the disaster news reports; Third, it can help the readers have a further insight of the written words which reflect the author's attitude to the disaster and help the journalists write the news more accurately.