| The news editorial is an important component in newspaper, which plays a vital part in influencing public opinion. The news editorial is a persuasive genre with a stable generic structure. News editorialists often strategically utilize language resources in each part of the structure so as to realize their communicative purposes. There have been enormous studies on the news editorial from different perspectives. However, they mainly center on the analysis of linguistic features. So far, it seems unlikely to find many researches on the English news editorial from both macro-and micro-perspectives. Therefore, this thesis intends to combine the GSP theory and Appraisal theory to analyze the generic structure and the appraisal resources of English news editorials, aiming to explore the relationship of generic structure and appraisal resources and to show whether appraisal resources shift through different communicative purposes of each structure.This thesis adopts a qualitative analysis towards 20 English news editorials randomly chosen from The New York Times, published in 2010 to explore the following questions:(1) What is the contextual configuration of English news editorials? (2) What is the generic structure of English news editorials? (3) What appraisal resources are preferred in the construction of each stage of the English news editorials? In analyzing the contextual configuration and the generic structure of English news editorials, it employs Hasan's Generic Structural Potential. In analyzing features of appraisal resources in different stages of English news editorials, it applies Martin's Appraisal Theory.This thesis asserts that that the genre of news editorials has social communicative purposes of explanation, persuasion and influencing public opinion determines the generic structure, and different communicative purposes of each stage of the structure have an effect on the choice of appraisal resources. Therefore, news editorialists usually achieve their communicative purposes through strategic utilization of appraisal resources to construe a concordant stance with the readers. In addition, the thesis concludes that the generic structure can influence the appraisal resources. That is, the generic structure determines the choice of appraisal resources.This thesis is composed of five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction about the motivation of the study, research aims and objectives, methodology and the research data, the significance, and the organization of the thesis. Chapter two provides a literature review of previous studies, including the definition of genre, studies of genre analysis home and abroad, studies on Appraisal system home and abroad as well as studies on English news editorials. The theoretical frameworks of this thesis, GSP theory and Appraisal theory, are the concern of chapter three. In chapter four, we will look at the generic structure of English news editorials based on Hasan's theory of GSP, and discuss the features and distribution of appraisal resources in each stage of the English news editorials. Chapter five presents the major findings, limitations as well as implications of this study.In a word, the combination of Hasan's GSP theory and Martin's Appraisal theory in the analysis of English news editorials in this thesis contributes a lot to the further study of news editorials. It will also help to arouse more attention to genre analysis from language researchers and to the awareness of the power of appraisal resources from the news editorials. |
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