A Comparative Study Of Sports News Form The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

In modern times, sports have become an important part in people’s daily life.Almost all the mainstream media have their sports columns. As the arrival ofdigitalization and informatization, with strengthening of international communicationand cooperation, people show great interest in some sports games in foreign countries,such as FIFA, NBA, and they are eager to get information about these sports games.Sports news usually provides readers with process and results of the games, thewinners, the losers and so on. It seems that these reports are objective and unambiguous.However, it is hard to use language in a completely non-personal manner, so it’s nearlyimpossible for news reporters to hold a neutral attitude towards the objective world.They usually exert a subtle influence on people’s cognition, behavior and valuesunconsciously.The Appraisal Theory, a new development of Systemic Functional Linguistics(hereafter SFL), shows a great vigor from the day it is established. It is “a particularapproach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate,to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positioningand relationships”(White,2004). It explores the way how language enables people toexpress their viewpoints, feelings, attitude and judgements so as to interact with othersand influence their behavior or viewpoints.In the present study, the writer applies the Appraisal Theory to analyzing10selected NBA news reports,5pieces from China Daily and5from New York Times.After a quantitative and qualitative study to the appraisal resources in the10selectedsports news, the study arrives at the following conclusions:1) Both the NBA newsselected from New York Times and the news selected from China Daily tends to usemore judgement values in the news reports. Appreciation is the least employed values inthe NBA news. Besides, the selected NBA news in both newspapers favors the positiveattitude values. The difference is that the news reporters from New York Times tend topay more attention to the emotional response than those from China Daily, and thereporters from China Daily hold a more positive attitude towards the games than thereporters from New York Times.2) In terms of engagement, both the NBA news selected from New York Times and that selected from China Daily tends to restrict thedialogic space in their news reports. In other words, the selected NBA news in bothNew York Times and China Daily is relatively subjective. The difference is that thenews reports in New York Times tend to be less dialogically contractive than those inChina Daily. That is to say, the news reports in China Daily are more subjective thanthose in New York Times.3) In the selected NBA news, the reporters tend to employmore “force” values than “focus”. They adopt more force-raising values to amplify theirevaluations thus to enhance the propositions being advanced in the texts, which is moreevident in the news reports in China Daily than those in New York Times.The present study provides a critical reading method of analyzing linguisticfeatures in news reports so that we can identify the hidden appraisal meaning in thenews reports and get the real intention when we read the international news reports. Inaddition, the present study offers a supplement to the application of the AppraisalTheory in the field of news discourse analysis. It conducts a comparative study on thesame event so that it can reveal the different positions of respective reporters.