Attitudinal Evaluation And Dialogic Evaluation In English Editorials

Appraisal theory, considered as the extension of interpersonal meta-function of Systemic Functional Linguistics, sprang up in the 1990s. It provides a theoretical framework for discourse analysis mainly from the lexical-grammatical level. The theory focuses on attitudinal negotiation in discourse. Appraisal theory includes three subsystems: Attitude, Engagement, Graduation. Attitude includes Affect, Judgement and Appreciation. Engagement evaluation mainly developed upon Bakhtin's heteroglossic theory, which is concerned with the diverse range of resources by which speakers/writers adjust and negotiate the arguability of their utterances. Therefore, the most distinctive feature of Engagement evaluation lies in its dialogic function.Journalistic Comment is a particular style full of evaluation resources. Editorial is a characterized journalistic comment style. At present, very few researches on stylistic features of editorial are concerned with the Appraisal theory. This thesis tries to interpret the editorial style from the perspective of attitude evaluation and engagement evaluation. All the data are selected at random from Washington Post and New York Times in America and People's Daily in China, which are all on the international political issues, for example, North Korea's nuclear test, Bush's new Iraq policy, the withdrawing of British troops from Iraq, etc.The following conclusions can be obtained through analysis:From the perspective of Attitude evaluation, affect resources in editorials are far outnumbered by judgement or appreciation resources. Besides, evaluative features may vary among different cultures. For instance, the targets of attitudinal evaluation towards the same international issue are in great discrepancy between the United States and China.From the perspective of Engagement, dialogic evaluation resources such as Entertain, Attribution, Proclaim and Disclaim, grouped under the system of Engagement, serve to conduct the dialogic function. These Engagement resources are employed by the editor frequently in order to negotiate with the readers and leave space for them, showing the intersubjective and interactive nature in editorials.In this paper, the author first introduces the Appraisal theory,editorial style. Literature both on Appraisal theory and editorials will be reviewed. Appraisal Theory as the theoretical framework in this paper will be introduced in Chapter One; Chapter Two will illustrate the stylistic features of editorials in the light of Attitude evaluation. In Chapter Three, the dialogic features of editorials will be explored from the perspective of Engagement evaluation. This study provides a new perspective to the stylistic study of editorials, and Appraisal theory is proved to be an effective tool in discourse analysis. It also enlightens language learners to develop a better understanding in evaluative reading.