A Comparative Study Of News Reports From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

In September 7th 2010, a Chinese fishing boat was captured by Japanese Coast Guard, and 23 crews, including the captain, were detained by the Japanese authority. The investigation launched by Okinawa prefecture is based on Japanese domestic laws, which brought Chinese government into the scene. The escalating diplomatic conflicts brought the fragile Sino-Japanese relations to its lowest level. In order to understand the subtle differences between the tendencies of their reportage, and reveal the attitudes held by British and American media as well as the western societies they represent, the present study collects as many news items as possible to conduct a comparison under the guidance of J. R. Martin's Appraisal theory.Appraisal theory proposed by J. R. Martin is extended from Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar. It pays much attention to the evaluative resources in the discourse and tries to reveal the influence put forward by ideologies. It is mainly used in the analysis of journalistic and historical discourses. According to Martin and White (2005: 34),―appraisal itself is regionalized as three interacting domains, namely ?attitude', ?engagement'and ?graduation'. Attitude is concerned with feelings, including emotional reactions, judgments of behaviors and evaluation of things. Engagement deals with sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse. Graduation attends to grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred.‖The present study try to identify the influences put forward by different ideologies in Britain and the US on their news reporting by analyzing the continuous reports on the incident of China-Japan boat collision.News reports on the incident have been collected from BBC international, Guardian news, Fox news and New York Times. This incident lasted for nearly two months, during which, the early release of the Chinese captain might bring some shifts in the attitudes held by media from different sources. In order to examine the possible shifts, a corpus is built with the help of AntConc and UAM Corpus Tools to facilitate the comparison.The comparison consists of the following two parts:A horizontal comparison is conducted in the first part. The news items collected are placed into two groups in accordance with their sources, and the two groups are named UK-sourced and US-sourced respectively. Since there might be some shifts in the attitudes held by the news items from both sources, the horizontal comparison is reported in two sections: the comparison between the attitudes embedded in the UK-sourced and US-sourced news items before the early release of the Chinese captain, and the comparison between the attitudes embedded in those news items after the early release.A vertical comparison is conducted afterward. The news items collected are placed into two groups in accordance with their publishing date, and the two groups are named Phase I (pre-release) and Phase II (post-release). The comparison in this part is reported in the following two sections: the attitudes held by the British media before and after the early release, and the attitudes held by the American media before and after the early release.It is noticed in the horizontal comparison that the concerns of the UK and the US media are different in both phases, and the constitution of the evaluative resources in the news items from both sources are different accordingly. While in the vertical comparison, the evaluative resources in the British news reports are relatively constant before and after the early release, while those in the American news reports before and after the release shows some significant changes. Based on the findings, it is safe to conclude that the British media keeps a neutral attitude along the development of the incident, and the ideational content of these evaluative resources are closely related to the incident itself. Quiet on the contrary, the proportion of the negative resources are increasing in the news reports of the American media, and the ideational content shifts from the incident itself towards the Chinese threats to the stability of APAC and the weakness of the now-in-reign Japanese authorities in facing its emerging neighbor, and viewed the early release of the Chinese captain as an "humiliating retreat".By utilizing Appraisal theory, the present study sets up an example for comparing the news reports from the UK and the US and reveals the possible influence brought by the ideological factors. Due to the uneven distribution of the news items from both sources, the reliability of the findings might be weakened.