On The Interpersonal Meanings Of News Discourse

In such an information explosion world, media is changing people's life at a sweeping and overwhelming speed. With the intense and frequent communication with outside world, News, especially news in English has become something ordinary in people's daily life. Any news report can not be utterly neutral or value-free as some journalists have often claimed to be. In fact, the reporter's viewpoint, attitude and ideology loaded in the news discourse are part of the total meaning of a discourse. To the readers, this kind of additional meanings ----interpersonal meanings, that makes their diverse levels of understanding and insight.This thesis investigates the interpersonal meanings of three sample news discourses under the framework of a newly developed theory--- Appraisal Theory. Appraisal theory isn't a totally new theory, which is located within the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and is the further development of Interpersonal Meaning. It aims to establish a complete system of evaluative resources, and with which to analyze the interpersonal meaning implied in discourses. Appraisal Theory has proved applicable to the study of a wide range of areas including the media, history texts, conversation, critical literary writings etc. It turns out to be a very effective discourse analysis tool.As for the features of interpersonal meanings in news discourses, based on the findings of the present research, are listed as following. Firstly, Judgment and Appreciation are shown to be dominant attitudes across all three sample discourses while Affect scores a low frequency of employment. That indicates that the reporter of the three discourses pays more attention to the human behavior and objects than people's emotions. This also indicates that the reporter's attitudinal tendency is more vaguely implied in linguistic resources of Judgment and Appreciation in the discourse. Secondly, the analysis shows that there is an active interaction between the reporter's voice and other voices. More contraction resources are found in sample discourse one (57%) and sample discourse three (63%); the dominant sub-category of engagement in discourse three is"counter-expectation"which occupies 63% while the dominant sub-type of engagement in discourse two is"attribute"which takes up 58%. This means that compared with the author of sample two the author of sample three is not more likely to open up the dialogic space for alternative positions of potential readers,hence, it is more subjective. Thirdly, reporters of the three discourses employ more'force'than 'focus'to amplify the evaluation. The reporters unexceptionally adopt much more the values of force-raising than the values of focus with a percentage of 67%, a percentage of 88% and a percentage of 86%. It can be concluded that the reporters of the three samples tend to intensify their evaluation and to enhance the proposition being advanced in the discourse by using more force-raising. This analysis will help the reader to gain a critical comprehension of news discourse and therefore form their own judgment, at the same time it will bring some enlightenment to the English Reading and Writing Teaching.