Research On The Interpersonal Meaning Realization Of News Text

The modern mass-media news text is one of the most influential written text types in contemporary society. There is a common belief that news text should reflect news event fairly and without bias. However. News reporting is always conditioned by points of view informed variously by the social subjectivity of reporters, editors and media owners. What events are reported is not a reflection of the intrinsic importance of those events, but reveals the operation of a complex and personal intrusion of the news event. It is such a special register that its language is rich in interpersonal meanings laden with contestation between different political groupings, ideological positions and cultural backgrounds. But such interpersonal meanings are so naturally backgrounded and encoded by the so-called objective strategies. If ordinary audiences fail to develop a taste to detect these tricks, they are subject to be unjustly misguided by the information disseminated in the new reporting.The former study on news text focuses either on stylistic features including lexical or syntactical characteristics of news text, or on sociolinguistics including variations in some lexical or syntactic features operating across institutional, professional and cultural context of news production, or on sociological studies of news values or ideologies which govern the daily activities of reporters in gathering and writing the news. None of the studies attempt to develop a thorough and comprehensive account of rhetorical potentials particularly typical of news reporting through the aspect of language function.The analysis tool employed by this dissertation is a combination of both grammars and semantics grounded on Halliday's Systematic Functional Grammar and Martin's Appraisal Theories. On the basis of this tool, pairs of news from different news agencies on same events are purposefully selected when the author tries to analyze how different reporters employ certain lexical grammatical resources to realize different interpersonal functions. Such comparison is certainly more direct and persuasive in explaining the nature of news text language.Halliday classifies three meta-functions of language, namely ideational, interpersonal and textual. Although he always claims the equal statues of the three functional components and their simultaneous realization at each level. he gives out a segmented explanation of the grammatical resources to realize interpersonal meaning and believes that transitivity mainly realizes ideational function, that mood, modalityand key mainly realize interpersonal function and that theme and rheme system mainly realize textual function. Through analysis and discussion, the author finds that as far as news text is concerned, subject chain, transitivity, modality as well as the resources to reveal attitude, engagement and graduation, function together to realize interpersonal meaning. Therefore the distribution of interpersonal meaning in the discourse cannot be clearly segmented. It is possible for some linguistic resources in certain genre to realize ideational function and interpersonal function at the same time and sometimes it is also difficult for us to distinguish which function a linguistic resource realizes.Halliday's tenor framework, though useful in explaining speech role relationships of oral exchange, cannot explain the fundamental interpersonal relationship involved in news text. The author also makes a thorough description of the tenor framework of news text and believes that a journalist's ideological stance, attitude orientation, and potential readership determine a news text's grammatical and semantic selection.The thesis, therefore, has both theoretical and practical significance. In theory, this study just widens and deepens the field of text analysis concerning with interpersonal meaning studies. Especially the author's account of tenor framework of news text is complementary to the study of context. In practice, this study can deepen our understanding on news language by examining under the surface how linguistic recourses construe the social roles, relationships and attitudes of interlocutors. It can benefit both language learners and journalists to increase their consciousness of the nature of news language.