| Appraisal Theory is a new grammatical-functional framework of interpersonal meaning based on Systemic Functional Linguistics.It is of great significance to use the attitude system to express attitudinal meaning,that is,the thoughts and opinions expressed by the appraiser—the speaker or writer who tells us what someone else feels(Martin,2005,p.90).Education is conductive to country development and material wealth.It promotes economic growth,advances national prosperity,and achieves human development.Education report reflects the development of education and social ideology,which has also attracted the attention of Chinese and foreign scholars.At present,the research on the analysis of educational report is gradually increasing,but there are not many researches on education news reports.Therefore,as our country’s official media,China Daily’s attitude towards Chinese education deserves a thorough and detailed study.In view of this,this study organizes and analyzes 30 news reports in China Daily based on Appraisal Theory,and intends to explore the following questions:1)What are the distribution of attitude resources in the education news reports?2)What attitudinal meanings are reflected by different attitude resources in the education news reports?3)How do the attitude resources help to construct the attitudinal meaning in the education news reports?To conduct the analysis,both qualitative and quantitative approaches are adopted in this study.The dominant approach used in this thesis is qualitative,for the reason that it involves a detailed and insightful analysis of the appraisal resources in the news reports.With the marking and annotation by UAM corpus tool 3.3,quantitative approach is adopted to deal with the number and percentage of different attitude resources of the target material.Based on the quantitative analysis,qualitative analysis is used to describe the realization or construction of attitudinal meaning.By adopting such a combination of above two approaches,the present study makes the efforts to realize an in-depth understanding of the meaning construction process of news reports on the education.The results show that:(1)In education news reports,attitude resources are used by participants to express their emotions in a direct way.Therefore,attitude resources are abundant in education news reports,and they are reflected in the lines of sentence.(2)Positive attitude resources far exceed negative attitude resources in number.News reports not just convey objectivity,but also show the image of Chinese education and promote Chinese education.(3)Judgment resources and appreciation resources are used to express the objectivity in news reports,but attitude resources are more subjective in the same level.Therefore,among the affect system,the judgment system and the appreciation system,the proportion of the affect system is low,because news focuses on objectivity.(4)In the judgment system,social esteem is mainly reflected in the evaluation of educators and the education system,and its attitudinal meaning is almost positive.Social sanction is mainly reflected in some social problems about education,such as education fairness,misconduct of the teacher,educational competition,etc.(5)In the appreciation system,valuation takes a larger proportion,and educational facilities and educators are evaluated in the news.The evaluation of educational phenomena emphasizes its importance in society.(6)Different attitudes are shown in the reports,which can influence readers’ attitudes to guide readers,so that the participant can achieve emotional resonance.This study analyzes the attitude resources in China Daily in detail from the perspective of linguistics,and aims to further verify the practicability and explanatory power of Appraisal Theory,broaden its application range,provide some useful enlightenment for the application of Appraisal Theory in news reports.Moreover,it not only provides a new sight for future scholars to study news reports,but also helps readers interpret news reports comprehensively in an objective way. |
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