The Interpersonal Meaning Of Engagement Resources In Political Editorials In American Newspapers

Appraisal Theory is a further development and advancement of the researches on the interpersonal functionof Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. It is mainly used to explore and describe how speakers/writersmake evaluation and construct textual personas, as well as how they manage the interpersonal relationship withactual or potential respondents. It is divided into three subsystems: attitude, engagement, and graduation.Editorial is a sub-genre of news discourse. It occupies an important place in western newspapers. It makestimely comments on current important and hot issues from the perspective of editorial department and presentsthe position and attitude of newspaper so as to guide and persuade the public. The topics of editorial could covermyriad aspects of social life, such as politics, economy, culture, military and so on. At present, a number ofvaluable studies on the editorial discourse have been done abroad and at home, however, few attempts have beenmade to study the editorials with a specific topic from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. Therefore, based onthe engagement system under the Appraisal Theory, this thesis is conducted to explore the frequency of differentengagement resources in the political editorials and how these resources are used by editorial writers to realizethe interpersonal meanings.20political editorials are collected from American two authoritative newspapers’ official websites—theNew York Times (http://www.nytimes.com) and the Washington Post (http://www.Washingtonpost.com/). Thepublishing time of these20political editorials is ranging from July to August in2012. In order to guarantee thevalidity of the data, the number of words in each political editorial is limited to450-550. With the help of theUAM CorpusTool, both qualitative and quantitative analytical methods are adopted in the process of analysis.Quantitative approach is used to make a statistical analysis so as to find the features of frequency of differentengagement resources in political editorials. Qualitative approach is applied to explore how these engagementresources are deployed strategically by writers to realize the interpersonal meaning and achieve their writingpurposes. The conclusions can be drawn through analysis:In the political editorials of American newspapers, different engagement resources are used by writers toexpress their positions, viewpoints and attitudes. Although the engagement resources are used widely in thepolitical editorials, the frequency of these resources is different. Entertain resources (32.86%) and denyresources (25.35%) are used frequently, while other engagement resources are comparatively less employed. Inthe entertain resources, the use of modal verbs takes the first place. On the whole, contractive resources areused more than expansive resources in political editorials, which is compatible with the features of political editorials. Both contractive resources and expansive resources are used strategically by the writers to close oropen up the dialogic space so as to actively interact with potential readers and persuade them to accept or leantoward the writers’ propositions.This study can help readers provide further insights into the reading of English editorial discourse,especially political editorials and make them better understand and unfold the meanings of ideology hidden inthe language. Simultaneously, it is hoped to help learners have a good command of some evaluation resourcesused to express the meaning of persuasion when writing some persuasive essays, such as editorial, newscomment and so on.