A Study On Engagement Resources In Disaster News Reports From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As an important component of news reports,disaster news reports have attracted much attention from academic circle for their extremely high news values.In recent years,disasters occurred increasingly in both home and abroad,and there are more and more studies on disaster news.Properly handling and reporting disaster news plays a significant part in reassuring people’s mind and establishing a good image of a country.Therefore,studying disaster news has its practical meaning.The current study takes engagement,a sub-system of appraisal theory as its theoretical framework,choosing English news reports on the big and historic aviation accident happened on March 8,2014,namely the air crash of MH370 as its study materials.It compares the similarities and differences in the distribution of engagement resources in a Chinese newspaper and an American newspaper,aiming at revealing their hidden attitudes and stances when reporting this event.The author of this paper selects altogether 30 articles on the air crash of MH370 from China Daily and New York Times(15 respectively)and carefully counts the engagement resources employed.Through both qualitative and quantitative analysis,the author finds that there are both similarities and differences in their use of engagement resources.As for the similarities,both two newspapers tend to use more expansive resources rather than contractive ones,and entertain resources in two newspapers are quite similar.The expansive resources welcome other voices.As a type of expand resources,the entertain resources have the nature of expressing uncertainties.Given that the event itself has many possibilities and uncertainties,thus we can see that both two newspapers are relatively objective on reporting this event.As for the differences,the disclaim and acknowledge resources are different in two newspapers.Within contract type,disclaim resources in New York Times exceed those in China Daily;within expand type,acknowledge resources in China Daily outweigh those in New York Times.And these differences do show their different attitudes when reporting this event.New York Times employs more contractive resources to state their own position,trying to take the lead in the whole reports.It indicates their attempt to manifest the power of their government and indirectly deny the Chinese government’s capability.Compared with New York Times,China Daily uses more acknowledge resources to refer to the voices of experts and authorities,trying its best to restore the truth of the event for people.It shows that the Chinese government and its media pay more attention to the event itself,the families of those victims and the Chinese people.This paper makes a comparative study of two major English newspapers’ reportage of the MH370 aviation accident from the perspective of engagement system within appraisal theory.It hopes that this paper can provide a new angle for the study of disaster news reports and broaden the scope of the study of appraisal theory,providing a tentative approach for the study of other types of discourse.