An Analysis Of The Appraisal Difference Towards The News Of Terrorist Attacks Between Western And Chinese Media

Systemic functional linguistics includes three aspects:concept function, textual function and interpersonal function, appraisal theory is developed based on the interpersonal function, which focuses on the reinterpretation of the interpersonal function from the point of exchange structure, taking the method of discourse analysis to observe subtle feelings, judge and appreciation which the speaker shows. This paper is based on the appraisal theory, collecting statistics and analyzing the usage of appraisal resources in news discourse, investigating how the speaker and hearer jointly establish appraisal attitude. Through the analysis of the text, this paper finds that the definition of the type of attitude is not enough, so we increase "appraisal object" in the classical appraisal theory.This paper is divided into four parts, the first part introduces the general framework of appraisal theory, the development of semantic research and the research on the interpersonal function by Halliday. In addition, it introduces three subsystems: ENGAGEMENT, ATTITUDE, GRADUATION. Through the genre analysis on the three subsystems:the ATTITUDE is divided into affect, judgment and appreciation, ENGAGEMENT is divided into intra-vocalise and extra-vocalise, GRADUATION is divided into the force and focus, in which the force is including intensification and quantification, focus is including the sharp and soft. The three subsystems are parallel.In the second part, taking the terrorist happening in Kunming as an example, analyze and compare the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western news media discourse and the way of reporting, taking the Chinese "People Daily", "Guangming Daily", "JINGWAH", British "Daily Telegraph", CNN America Fawkes as the source of news discourse, exhaustively collect the news report on the KunMing Railway Station terrorist cases from 1st to 8st, March, evaluate the distribution of appraisal resource, investigate how the appraisal resources realize the interpersonal meaning. It also includes how the authors expose the truth of the news, how to convey the attitude of the parties, how to adjust the distance between the readers and construct the interpersonal meaning, enable the readers to accept the views of the authors.The third part compares the western news discourse-including the judgment, affection, appreciation, pointing out that the Chinese and Western media commonly taking the most attention to the terrorist molecules, victims and their families. But as to the government assessment, there is a great difference between the western and Chinese discourse. From the horizontal comparison, in the western discourse, judgment attitude is of the highest frequency, followed by affection attitude, appreciation attitude is at least. On the explicit and implicit way to realize the distribution point of view, the Chinese authors tend to use explicit expression in attitude; on the contrary, the western discourses tend to use implicit way much frequently.The fourth part studies Chinese and Western news media discourse through the way of contrasting the ENGAGEMENT, GRADUATION subsystems. On the distribution of ENGAGEMENT, the single sound and multi sound in reports written by the Chinese media is basically balanced, the western media use multi sound far more than one sound. the expanded discourse occupy the majority of engagement resources in the Chinese reports; but the contraction and expansion of the western discourse is in the balance. Western and Chinese media have significant differences in the internal tendency of the way of contraction, Western media reports focus on denying and countering the views of Chinese media, but the Chinese medium deny unjust report, counter against the violence molecules act, declare their own attitude. On the distribution of graduation system, the total graduation resources in Western media is hardly different, and force and focus resources distribution is roughly same, the force which is reflecting the strength and quality is far greater than the focus which reflects the purity of category. However, the western and Chinese media tend to use different strategies of force:the Chinese media use adverbs to describe the action process; western media authors use more adjectives indicating that the quality of the whole thing. In the use of focusing strategy, the western and Chinese media focus upon the object what is the nature of the case itself commonly, but the Chinese use more sharpening strategy, Western journalists use relatively more soften strategy.The western and Chinese media adopt different appraisal tendency and strategy in the reports of the same news events, the reason can be traced back to the aspects of culture, ideology, writing habits and other factors, for the analysis of discourse towards the terrorist news, involves linguistics, sociology, aesthetics, psychology and other aspects. The comparison of the terrorist news by the Chinese and Western media, can remind us some unjust evolution by western media about Chinese conditions, and provide some suggestions as to how we make strategic response on the injustice news.