English Newspapers as Specimen: A Study of Linguistic Features of the English Newspapers in the 20th Century From Historical Linguistics

Abstract

The 20^th century has posed to us a challenge we have never met before, that is, we were living in a world in tremendous changes. English language, as a growing organism, from the point of historical linguistics, is a witness to these changes. English language presents us with a lot of new features in the 20^th century, echoing with the changes of people’s material and spiritual life reflected in daily happenings. English newspapers are a good place to observe these new features.

With English newspapers as exemplars, the article conducts a survey on the linguistic features of English language in the 20^th century from the perspective of historical linguistics. The investigation has been conducted in three aspects: the lexical level, the grammatical level and rhetorical level. Besides, another thing is noticeable during  investigation. That is to say, linguistic features of English language should be examined in relation to scientific, political, religious and other factors in a broad social context. It is social reality that has shaped most of these features, and the features are a mirror of the social reality.