A Contrastive Study Of Engagement In Chinese And English Crisis Coverage

In the recent years, crisis events happen frequently. Having caused a great harm to the human's life and property, crisis events have attracted a lot of people's attention. As one of the main source to get information, crisis coverage plays an essential role in the society, which has been studied by lots of scholars and experts. However, the researches of crisis coverage mainly focus on reporting concept, function, modal, policies, strategies and the problems. Contrastive studies of English and Chinese crisis coverage have been processed, but mainly conducted in the field of medium communication. Studies on crisis coverage from the perspective of discourse analysis, especially under the theoretical framework of Appraisal Theory are limited.Appraisal Theory, proposed by Martin in the early 1990s, is a new way to analyze discourse in Systemic Functional Linguistics. This theory is concerned with the linguistic resources by which texts/speakers come to explore, describe and explain the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positions and relationships. The three subcategories of Appraisal Theory are:attitude, engagement and graduation. Under Appraisal Theory, the engagement resources serve to realize the interaction between the addresser and the addressees. The speaker or the writer displays his or her stances by such resources such as:attribution, entertain, deny and so on.The present study analyzes distribution of different engagement resources in crisis coverage; probes the feature of the occurrence; describes how the authors use engagement resources to release objective, authentic, and neutral reports; explores the similarities and differences between English and Chinese crisis reporting and explain the underlying reasons.The analyzed data in the thesis includes ten crisis topics, such as earthquake, H1N1, air crash and so on, and each topic has four texts:two in Chinese and two in English. All these crisis reports are collected from influential English and Chinese newspapers'official websites such as Xinhua net (http://news.xinhuanet.com/), The Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/), Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com). With the help of professional linguistic software UAM CorpusTool v2.0, the occurrence of each type of engagement resources has been detected. Statistic results show that engagement resources have been widely used to display the reporters'stances and positions.Similarities:1) Expand resources overweigh contract resources in both English and Chinese crisis news. Expand resources leave space for the alternatives, which is indispensable for the uncertain development of the crisis reporting; 2) Acknowledge takes the whole part of attribute type in both languages. By quoting others'voices, reporters show the factuality, truthfulness, reliability and believability of assertions in the reports.3) Entertain resources in English and Chinese crisis reports occur almost at the same rate. Both languages use the entertain resources to make predictions or give comments to the future tendency of these crises, which leave dialogical space for alternatives to avoid assertive reporting.Differences:1) On contrary to English, more proclaim resources than disclaim resources have been employed in the Chinese crisis reports; 2) Compared with English, Chinese reports hardly use deny resource; 3) In disclaim system, Chinese crisis reports tend to use endorse resources rather than deny resources, nevertheless, English crisis reports use these two resources equally; 4) Chinese crisis news leans to use more endorse resources than English. Different thinking modal, culture tradition, reporting tradition and politics are the main reasons for these differences.Analyzing the English and Chinese crisis coverage under the theoretical framework of engagement system in Appraisal Theory, the present study probes the distribution of different engagement resources, digs the distributing similarities and differences between these two languages, explores how the reporters make a objective, neutral, authorial crisis reporting by engagement resources, finds underlying reasons for the similarities and differences of different language crisis reporting, deepens the understanding of crisis reporting discourse, promotes the development of crisis management and communication of different language. The research shows that Appraisal Theory can be applied to analyze the writer's stances in crisis reports. As an application of engagement in Appraisal Theory, the study aims to make a contribution to the application of the theory.