| Carter and Nash (1990) contend that, "After all, newspaper reports should ideally report the facts in as core a vocabulary as possible". Lu Dingyi states that news report is the report of facts that happened recently. It has the primary function of keeping people informed of the facts (Ma Xianyi,2000). These words clearly show that the position of news report should be objective, factual and neutral. However in reality, this position has been challenged by different social, cultural, ideological, or even political and economic values. As a result, news report has been confined to a more or less degree. Thus, the analysis of news report should take different social values into concern. As news report has different categories with each having different characteristics, it is necessary to classify them so as to have a clear mind of what kind of news report this thesis is about. The data chosen are about hard news since this thesis is selecting hard news as an example to give a tentative study. According to P.R.R. White (2000), hard news is reports typically associated with eruptive violence, reversals of fortune and socially significant breaches of the moral order. It includes both reports which are primarily grounded in a material event such as an accident, natural disaster, riot or terrorist attack, and those grounded in a communicative event such as speech, interview, report or press release. And it is in hard news that people's attitudes are easy to recognize to express the deep interpersonal relations in different languages, such as in English and Chinese.Appraisal Theory (AT) proposed by James Martin and P.R.R. White, is a new aspect of study in Systemic Functional Linguistics. "It is concerned with evaluation:the kinds of attitudes that are negotiated in a text, the strength of the feelings involved and the ways values are sourced and readers aligned" (Martin& Rose,2003:23). So researches into the evaluative meaning by different kinds of discourses are always carried out (cf. White,1998; Martin & Rose,2003; Martin & White,2005). The Appraisal system is a multi-dimensional one regionalized as three interacting systems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. And each of these three categories has their sub-classifications. Attitude system, dealing with the values by which the speaker/writer expresses his Judgment toward human behavior and associates emotional/affective response with participants and processes, can be further divided into three subfields:Affect (the expression of feelings), Judgment (to judge the characters) and Appreciation (to value the worth of things). These three domains are traditionally referred to as emotion, ethics and aesthetics. As this thesis is based on the Judgment system, so now words are only given to focus on this sub-system. Judgment deals with attitudes towards behavior which we admire or criticize, praise or condemn. (Martin and White 2005:42) It has been chosen to reference attitudinal evaluation in which human behavior positively or negatively assessed by reference to some set of social norms (White 2001). Generally, Judgment can be analyzed into two types:those dealing with social esteem and those oriented to social sanction. Judgments of social esteem have to do with normality (how unusual someone is), capacity (how capable they are), and tenacity (how resolute they are); Judgments of social sanction are about veracity (how truthful someone is) and propriety (how ethical someone is). And Judgment can be recognized as positive (those admired or praised) and negative (those criticized or condemned) evaluations. Under Judgment, human behavior is assessed moral/immoral, legal/illegal, polite/impolite, normal/abnormal etc. according to the certain social ethics or moral standards. In other words, Judgment involves some set of religious, legal or moral rules and regulations at issue. As a result, even the same lexical phenomena will be interpreted differently by people from different cultural or ideological backgrounds. The evaluation people judged will be lowered or raised by the esteem of their own community.This thesis has encoded all the data into UAM Corpus Tool as an instrument to give a further analysis of the similarities and most significantly, differences to find out if there is something in common or not in common in attitudinal system between English and Chinese languages in the aspect of hard news. After encoding the data into the scientific tool UAM Corpus Tool, statistics show that in Chinese and English hard news, the normality type in Judgment is enjoying a superior role, as 40.08%(725 instances) in Chinese and 50.61%(289 instances) in English. In the EXPLICITNESS part, the inscribed is much more than invoked one, which is a phenomenon that in reporting, the news item tends to be unbiased and clearly stated so as to be seemingly objective. At last in the ATTITUDE-POLARITY part, the positive and negative part are occupying the majority role which means that news reports tend to judge affairs firmly and strongly, few would be ambiguous. Considering the differences in ideology, culture and history, the Chinese and English, hard news reports have something different in judging attitudes. The normality type in English corpus is more than that in Chinese corpus, with percentage 50.61%>40.08%. The tenacity type in Chinese corpus enjoys a better role than in English, with 15.92%>9.28%. A high frequent different type is in propriety, in which the Chinese corpus is 10.67%, far higher than English corpus which is only 5.78%. The positive attitude in Chinese corpus is less than that in English corpus, with49.20%<55.87%. And the frequency is quite obvious. As in ambiguous aspect, the percentage in Chinese corpus is 2.38% which is more than that in the English corpus which is only 0.35%. As different cultures have different ways in expressing their feelings, Judgment attitude is a term culture-oriented and closely associated with the writer/speaker's ideology; at the same time, the reader may have different interpretations to what the writer/speaker has stated. Hence, under Judgment attitude, any utterance conveying either negative or positive assessments will however be grasped by the reader according to their own understandings based on their own cultures and ideologies. This case supplies evidence in analyzing media discourse which is:in the analysis, both the speaker/writer's position and that of the reader's should be considered, and this part acts as the reasoning to support why there exist differences in Chinese an English news reports.
|
PDF Full Text Request