An Analysis Of News Reports On Beijng 2022 Olympic Winter Games From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory covers three subsystems: Attitude,Engagement,and Graduation.Attitude is the core of Appraisal Theory,indicating the speaker’s emotions and attitudes;Engagement focuses on the way the speaker participates in the discourse,emphasizing the dialogic space;Graduation regulates the scale of the speaker’s evaluation.Appraisal Theory is a new development of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics by Martin et al.Since it was put forward,scholars at home and abroad have conducted research on it from both theoretical and application aspects.Theoretical research complements Appraisal Theory,and applied research analyzes various discourses under the framework of Appraisal Theory,including the research on news discourse,speech discourse,advertisement discourse and so on.However,there are few researches on the news discourse of the Beijing Olympics Winter Games from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.In 2022,the 24 th Olympic Winter Games were held successfully in China.Since then,Beijing has become the first city to host both the Summer Olympic Games and the Olympic Winter Games in the world,which has attracted the world’s attention.Both domestic and foreign media have given a series of detailed reports on it.This thesis collects 30 news reports about the Beijing Olympic Winter Games from the official website of China Daily from February 4 to February 20,2022,to build a small corpus.Under the theoretical framework of Appraisal Theory,this study uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods with the help of UAM Corpus Tool 6.2e to annotate the appraisal resources in the corpus,aiming to find out the appraisal resources,distributions and function of these appraisal resources in the selected news reports of the Beijing2022 Olympic Winter Games.The results show that the news reports of the Beijing Winter Olympics contain abundant appraisal resources including attitude resources,engagement resources and graduation resources.The frequency of use of the attitude resources was the highest,most of which are positive resources,followed by engagement resources.Graduation resources make up the lowest percentage of appraisal resources.Attitude resources cover affect,judgement and appreciation resources,which demonstrate the enthusiasm and capacity of China to hold the Beijing Olympic Winter Games.In engagement resources,dialogue expansion is much more significant than dialogue contraction.The involvement of external voices emphasizes the achievements of China in preparing for and hosting the Winter Olympic Games.Among the graduation resources,journalists prefer the use of force resources which are used eight times more frequently than focus resources,demonstrating the efforts China has made to hold the Beijing Winter Olympics and emphasizing that China has assumed the responsibilities and obligations.This study analyzes the news reports of the Beijing Winter Olympics under the framework of Appraisal Theory,which enriches the research of sports news discourse and Olympic-related news discourses,promotes the development of Appraisal Theory in the field of news discourse.Through the annotation and analysis of appraisal resources in the news reports of the Winter Olympics,the study not only helps to realize the enormous contributions made by China as a responsible country to the healthy development of the Olympic movement and the promotion of building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind,but also more profoundly understands news discourse.