An Appraisal Analysis Of American And Chinese News Reports

In the contemporary society, news reports are ubiquitous and essential to people's life. They provide an important channel for people to access to information. But the media sell not only the newspapers or magazines but also all kinds of thoughts, cultures and values. Ideologies in their communities exert great influence on news reporters' language choices in news reporting. Although news reports are required to be objective, Hodge and Kress believe that News reporters show their own opinions and attitudes by language strategies, and try to influence and manipulate readers by embedded ideologies in news reports. Therefore, readers have to read critically to find out the embedded ideologies in news reports when they are faced with the media and media information. In this way readers can enhance the ability of analyzing, understanding and using media information, and thus give their own opinions on the event being reported. The Appraisal system put forward by Martin in the 1990s can serve as an analytic tool to analyze news reports and help readers find out the real intentions of news reporters.The data of the present study are from People's Daily and New York Times. They are news reports about the Russia-Georgia conflict. The present study studies those news reports from the Appraisal perspective. It tries to unfold the relationship between evaluative language choices and the embedded ideologies. Then it analyzes how the evaluative resources are realized and distributed at three sub-systems of the Appraisal system——Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The present study also finds out the similarities and differences between the distributions of evaluative resources in the selected American and Chinese news reports.After the analysis, it is found that (1) Both the American and Chinese news reporters apply evaluative resources to hiding their own opinions and ideologies for the sake of the claimed objectivity of news reports. (2) The values of the sub-systems of the Appraisal system are distributed unevenly in the selected news reports. Under the Attitude system, neither Affect nor Appreciation is abundantly applied in American and Chinese news reports, compared with Judgment which assesses human behaviors. Besides, the American news reports have a higher frequency of implicit Judgment to cover their real opinions upon the event being reported. Under the Engagement system, both the American and Chinese news reporters employ abundant Engagement resources, especially the Attribute values. Neither of them employs Proclaim. Under the Graduation system, the American and Chinese news reporters both prefer to use Forces values.