A Contrastive Study Of Engagement Resources In Chinese And English Hard News

As a variety of mass media, news has played an important role in people's daily life and become the subject of a great deal of intellectual scrutiny. Appraisal Theory (AT) is a new approach to Discourse Analysis (DA) in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which gives a high priority to news discourse and White (1998) provides a detailed theoretical framework for the appraisal research of news discourse.AT, a recently developed lexico-grammatical framework for studying interpersonal meaning in Functional Grammar, is aimed to evaluate how language speakers use the linguistic resources to express semantics of evaluation, and explore, describe and explain the way the language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal relationships. The theory is concerned with the linguistic resources for and by which texts/speakers come to express, negotiate and naturalize particular inter-subjective and ultimately ideological positions (White, 1998). AT pays attention to the types of attitudes, the strength of the feelings involved, the ways in which values are sourced and readers aligned in the discourse. Appraisal system includes three sub-categories: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation.This thesis explores the different distribution patterns and frequencies of Engagement resources in Chinese and English hard news texts. The author of this thesis chooses twenty pieces of hard news from People's Daily and New York Times respectively, and with the help of statistical tool Systemic Coder, both qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed to make a detailed analysis. It can be clearly shown from the statistics that there exist many Engagement resources in both Chinese and English hard news corpora, and the latter has higher frequency than the former.The similarities between two corpora are as follows: in both target texts, Expand type (62.9 percent in Chinese and 71.6 percent in English) outweighs Contract type (37.1 percent in Chinese and 28.4 percent in English). In Expand system. Acknowledge values (36.5 percent in Chinese and 46.5 percent in English) have the most frequent occurrences. The next mostly used resources are Modality (20.8 percent in Chinese and 20.0 percent in English) and both targets texts get very similar frequencies on Modality values. Modality values are sub-classified into modal auxiliaries, modal adjuncts, modal attributes and mental verb/attribute projections in this thesis. Statistics show there don't exist great differences on the frequencies of all resources and the most favored type is modal-auxiliaries in both corpora. The analysis shows that the application of Modality is to show the assumption of the possibility in the future or the comment on the events which happened in the past and most of Modality values appear in the reported speeches. In Contract system, the most applied value is Counter (12.7 percent in Chinese and 14.0 percent in English) and the second one is Deny (10.8 percent in Chinese and 10.6 percent in English).As for the differences, this study focuses on the significant differences shown by 'compare files' study which is conducted by Systemic Coder. In Expand system, there exist significant differences on the frequencies of Acknowledge; In Contract system, the focus falls on Endorse.This study makes a detailed analysis of the differences. For the Acknowledge resources, statistics reveals that English hard news is inclined to use more direct speeches and clear resources. As for Endorse values, the analysis shows Chinese hard news quotes more speeches of authorities than English hard news. A general conclusion may be made that English hard news is more objective than Chinese hard news, but it can also be found that Chinese hard news intends to report the event itself while English hard news pays attention to the depth and width of reports. At last, this thesis attempts to give a reasonable explanation of the differences from the perspectives of culture and political institution.This thesis gives a Contrastive study of the Engagement resources in both Chinese and English hard news from the perspective of AT with a view to bringing new light to other genres and contributing to the application of AT in DA, therefore providing pedagogical implications to the reading, writing and translation of news discourse.