Stylistic Analysis on Online News Story Comments

This study examines stylistic features of the news story comments from major online news outlets and their possible ef-fects on the evolution of the English language. With a corpus composed of 34 examples drawn from renowned news sites such as The Washington Post, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, CNN and NBC, a detailed analysis on the stylistic features and effects of the news story comments has been conducted for the purpose of discovering possible links between a poster ’s linguistic behav-ior and his thought process. The result shows that interrogative, noun phrase and verb phrase are commonly used in news story comments by virtue of their slightly ostentatious nature. Rhetorical devices such as metaphor, simile and parataxis are frequently employed among comments. And the relationship between a poster’s educational background and his postings is also touched up-on at the end of this study.