| Appraisal theory (AT) is a further development of interpersonal function basedon the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). It contains three subsystems—attitude,graduation and engagement, which concerns with negotiable attitudes, the intensity ofinvolved emotions and the source of appraisal respectively. By employing appraisaltheory in discourse analysis, the researchers aim to evaluate how writers/speakers uselanguage to express their attitudes towards opinions and events, and how to negotiatetheir relationships with readers/listeners. Since the establishment of appraisal theory,Peter White has applied it into news media discourses. Until now, apart from theemployment in political, economical, technological and other kinds of newsdiscourses, the research field of appraisal theory has extended to almost all kinds ofspecialized discourses, such as literature, advertisement, academic book review andpolitical speech. However, the appraisal research on sports news discourses isrelatively scarce, especially on the contrastive study of English and Chinese sportsnews discourse.For the amazing winning of Ye Shiwen and the disqualification of women’sdouble badminton players during2012London Olympics, both Chinese and Englishsports news contain a large number of attitudes and evaluative expressions. Therefore,appraisal theory serves as an appropriate framework for the appraisal analysis of thesesports news. Within the framework of appraisal theory, the present research aims tocarry out a comparative study between Chinese and English sports news discoursesfrom three aspects—attitude, engagement and graduation so as to reveal the lexicalrealization and distribution of appraisal resources in the selected news reports. Thus,this study tries to reveal the reasons for the similarities and differences from theperspectives of culture and political system.The study selects8Chinese news reports and8English news reports about theevents–the winning of Ye Shiwen and the disqualification of women’s double badminton players during2012London Olympics as the research corpus. Thecomparative analysis is carried out by quantitative and qualitative analysis methods,which starts from the realizations of each subcategory and then comes to thepresentation of distribution frequencies in collected news. From the comparativestudy of appraisal resources, it concludes that besides similarities, there are also a lotof differences between Chinese and English news due to different culture and politicalsystems.For the similarities, in the overall frequency of appraisal resources, both Chineseand English news employ a great number of appraisal resources to express opinionsand negotiate interpersonal relationships. In attitude, they both employ moreappreciation and judgment than affect and they all use more negative attitude thanpositive attitude. In engagement, disclaim is applied more often than proclaim indialogical contraction, and attribute is applied more often than entertain in dialogicalexpansion. In graduation, force is more preferred than focus and they are all inclinedto be used to raise and sharpen opinions and attitudes. For the differences, Englishreports employ more appraisal resources than Chinese reports. Besides that,engagement holds a higher proportion in English news, while attitude and graduationare used more in Chinese news. In attitude, Chinese reports employ more affect thanEnglish reports. Moreover, negative attitude is more preferred in English news, whilepositive attitude is more preferred in Chinese news. In engagement, English reportersprefer dialogical expansion, while Chinese reporters employ more dialogicalcontraction. In graduation, Chinese reporters prefer to employ force and focus tomodify positive attitude, while English reporters use more force and focus to increasethe weight of negative attitude.It is believed that the contrastive analysis of English and Chinese sports newsfrom appraisal perspective can not only help the further development of appraisaltheory in research field and application, but also help learners to better understand andappreciate news discourse. |
PDF Full Text Request