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The studies on contrastive discourse analysis began in the early 1950s and have a history of more than 50 years. It is generally believed that most of the studies are from the lexical, syntactical and rhetorical perspectives. Besides, some other studies focus on the components of different kinds of discourse genres. With regard to the genres of contrastive discourse analysis, the former studies are mostly confined to the literal field, while other communicative discourses of commonality media, such as political news discourse, are rarely involved. Therefore, based on the former studies, this dissertation intends to have a contrastive analysis on the political news discourse in British and Chinese newspapers with the expectation of paving a new way for discourse analysis. With Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as its theoretical foundation, the study will summarize their specific linguistic characteristics from three perspectives of ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function.This dissertation comprises seven chapters. Chapter One presents a brief introduction of the definition, classification and characteristics of political news, the background, the objectives, and the framework of this dissertation. Chapter Two is the literature review. This chapter reviews previous studies on news reports, especially those applying Halliday’s functional grammar, so as to ensure the necessity and feasibility of the present study. Chapter Three introduces the sources of the data, the reasons for the data collection, the methodology and also the research procedures. Chapter Four, Chapter Five and Chapter Six are the main part of this thesis. Based on Halliday’s theory of three metafunctions, this dissertation adopts the study methods of descriptive analysis, qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, and then concludes the contrastive results about English and Chinese political news report discourses from ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Reasons are explored as to why similarities and differences exist between political news reports written in different languages. Chapter Seven draws conclusions, pointing out the implications, limitations and offering suggestions for future researches.
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