Interpersonal Meanings In Reports On Copenhagen Climate Change Conference From Attitude Perspective

In modern society, mass media is an effective and indispensable means of presenting and transmitting large amount of information to the public in everyday life. Besides, mass media expresses their evaluations and attitudes and always attempts to make alignment with the public. News reports, as a sub-category of media discourse, are generally the means of transmitting the up-to-date information which always focuses on hot points. More and more serious Climate Change results in more and more frequent disasters which threaten the human beings. So the Copenhagen United Nations Climate Change Conference, aiming at finding out the solution to fighting against climate change, has attracted many mass media to report. Besides media, nations, NGO, scholars and the common people also pay much attention to the conference. One of their concerns is the stances and measures about curbing global warming from main emitters, especially China and the United States. In recent years there are a few studies on Copenhagen Summit reports from journalism, environment and politics perspectives, but few are from the linguistic perspective, especially from the Attitude system which belongs to the appraisal system. With a view to it, this thesis is undertaken to study the reports on Copenhagen Summit from China Daily and New York Times with the adoption of Professor Martin's Appraisal system, especially the Attitude system, identifying and analyzing the respective attitudinal resources and how they aid to construing the interpersonal meanings in the text, thus, the similar and different interpersonal meanings from the two media are attempted to reveal by the similar and different attitudinal resource distributions.The Appraisal Theory, derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics, concerning on interpersonal meaning, focuses on the language of evaluation. There are three systems in the Appraisal theory:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The Attitude system is the core of the Appraisal system. It is based on the Attitude system that the research is carried out to explore the interpersonal meanings of the Copenhagen Summit reports in the two media.Of the 50 pieces of Copenhagen Summit reports analyzed in this thesis,25 pieces are taken from the official website of China Daily and New York Times respectively during the period of the conference. The author conducts a quantitative and qualitative research with the combined methodologies of description and interpretation. In light of the Attitude system, the attitudinal resources are identified and separated first. Then, a statistic study is done to the percentage of each kind of attitudinal meanings in order to explore their distribution frequencies and explanations are tried to give to the interpersonal meanings in respective reports. At last, the author makes a contrastive study on the attitudinal resources between the two media to find out the similar and different attitudinal resource distributions and explain the similar and different interpersonal meanings revealed by the similarities and differences.It is shown that various attitudinal resources are largely employed in the reports but with different distributional frequencies. It is found that in both media's reports, the Appreciation resources are most frequently used followed by Judgement resources and Affect resources. Most of the targets are things and phenomena, which is in accordance with the factualism and objectivity of news reports. There are more positive attitudinal resources than negative ones, which demonstrates that the two media with an optimistic view to the Copenhagen Summit are confident of the conference. However, in the reports from China Daily, there are more positive attitudinal resources with an overwhelmingly larger number than negative ones and Judgement resources also surpass Affect ones in large number. That reveals that China Daily expresses their firm confidence in the conference and pays more attention to the behaviors of the participants. In New York Times, though positive Attitude surpasses the negative one, negative attitudinal resources are similar in number to positive ones and Affect resources are also very equal to Judgement resources with more negative meanings. That is to say, New York Times which is more willing to express its emotional reaction holds more doubts and worries to the Copenhagen Summit.The result of the research indicates that though news reports are of factualism and objectivity, attitudes and stances can also be found out. Attitude as the core of the Appraisal system is of importance of the construction of the writer-reader relationship of "solidarity" and very helpful for readers to understand the interpersonal meanings of news reports...