Підручник для студентів старших курсів

2.4.2. Grammatical peculiarities. As the reporter has to be brief and to cram as much material as possible into the space allotted, a news report is characterized by a peculiar composition and by a certain syntactic structure of sentences.
2.4.2.1. The initial physical paragraph usually consisting of a single sentence the so-called ‘lead’ which both summarizes and begins to tell the story has a more or less fixed word-order. Journalistic practice has developed what is called the ‘five-w-and-h-pattern rule’ (who-what-why-how-where-when). In terms of grammar this fixed sentence structure may be expressed in the following manner: Subject – Predicate (+ Object) – Adverbial Modifier of Place – Adverbial Modifier of Time, e.g. ‘A neighbour’s peep through a letter box lead to the finding of a woman dead from gas and two others semiconscious in a block of council flats in Eccles New Road, Salford, Lancs., yesterday’. (The Guardian)
2.4.2.2. The size of a news report varies from one sentence to several, rather short paragraphs. Generally, the shorter the news item, the more complex its syntactic structure is. The following grammatical parameters are typical of a news report:

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  complex sentences with a developed system of clauses, e.g. ‘A Tory MP last night hit out at a Commons report which suggested there may be serious social unrest in Wales because of heavy unemployment’. (News of the World)
  

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  verbal constructions (infinitive, participial, gerundial) and verbal noun constructions, e.g. ‘Unions representing engineering and technical workers at British Leyland yesterday threatened industrial action to halt the planned axing of over 4,000 white collar jobs’. (Morning Star)
  

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  syntactical complexes, especially the Nominative-with-the Infinitive. These predicative constructions are largely used to avoid mentioning the source of information or to shun responsibility for the facts reported, e.g. ‘A large chunk of ice, believed to have fallen from an aircraft, crashed through the roof, then through the bedroom ceiling of a house in Leamington, Warwickshire, yesterday’. (Daily Express)
  

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