An Approach Of Graduation To The Attitudinal Meaning In English Hard News Discourse

An approach of graduation is taken in this thesis to investigate the categories and value of attitudinal meaning in hard news discourse. An analysis of the features of hard news discourse leads to the discovery of its three categories of attitudinal meaning—subjectivity, responsibility, and dialogism, which are discursively realized via particular attitudinal resources. This thesis examines the attitudinal resources in hard news discourse and proposes a series of mechanisms for adjusting the value of attitudinal meaning, including the explicit/implicit mechanism for subjectivity, the reporting verbs, source and contextualization mechanisms for responsibility, and the contraction/expansion mechanism for dialogism. In each mechanism, the value of attitudinal meaning is threefold leveled: high, medium and low, which facilitates the proceeding analysis.From the websites of some English newsthesis giants, 33 news texts are selected on the report of the financial crisis originating in Wall Street in 2008. The statistical analysis features the general distribution of attitudinal resources, the distribution of attitudinal resources of various categories and values, and the distribution of the patterns and co-occurrence of attitudinal resources.The results show that there are three reporting strategies that are typically employed in hard news. First, the news writer slips subjectivity into hard news discourse by employing implicit resources and attributing explicit resources; Second, both low and high responsibility resources serve to establish the writer's authority; Third, the writer secures solidarity by pulling off convergence among discursive participants for whom medium dialogic space is left for negotiation. In addition, resources of subjectivity, responsibility, and dialogism work in a joint effort to pull off a certain ideological orientation and a consolidated reading position.The strategies above can be explained from a socio-linguistic perspective: First, hard news discourse contributes to ideology. Hard news reporting is not characterized by objectivity as it claims to be. Rather, it bears certain values and inclinations; Second, hard news discourse contributes to power. Social power is built up through negotiation of attitudinal meaning, which is concerned with inter-subjective positioning, choice making and value adjusting. For inter-subjective positioning, the writer presents competing propositions and utterances and bring different voices into a dialogue. For choice making, though the author does not make the direct choice of which voice to support, his inclination to a certain alternative is still noticeable. As to the value of attitudinal meaning, flexible adjustments are made so that effective results are achieved in ideological orientation, authority and convergence.