| Appraisal Theory is concerned with the linguistic resources by which the writer or speaker can express their attitudes, get involved in propositions, and grade the assessment of meanings (Martin and White,2005). Appraisal Theory is categorized into three subsystems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Under each system, several braches are defined. News discourse is not a fresh field studied with respect to Appraisal Theory; However, English news discourse has not been studied proudly in attitudinal aspect. This research studies news discourses about RMB exchange rate from New York Times from the perspective of Attitude, trying to reveal American media's embedded ideology toward China and to provide readers with more insightful reading comprehension.In the year2010, the issue of RMB exchange rate became the focus dispute between China and USA. Obama had frequently imposed great pressure on the appreciation of Chinese currency. Whether China has pushed world economy into a great inflationary slump is becoming increasingly contentious. The news on RMB exchange rate also attracted attention from experts and ordinary people all around the world. The author of this thesis collects14news texts which report China's exchange rate reform from January,2010to December,2010from New York Times.By analyzing, observing and studying figures of attitudinal resources, the researcher answers the three researching questions mentioned in chapter1. There are several findings as follows:1. News reports on RMB exchange rate contain abundant appraisal resources. The overall analysis of Attitude system indicates a strong preference across all the texts to Judgment for attitudinal expression. Appreciation ranks second, and Affect resources are least frequently applied. The overall number of negative resources is dramatically larger than the number of positive resources in terms of each sub-type of Attitude. The predominance of negative attitude can be explained that journalists of New York Times are holding passive attitude toward Chinese exchange rate problem.2. Among the Affect resources, the instances of authorial Affect are all negative. They demonstrate that those journalists personally are not content with China's exchange rate policy. The feeling of Insecurity features non-authorial Affect resources, which presents strong negative emotions among American people because of pressure from China. In Judgment system, there are more values of Social sanction than Social esteem, and the values of Judgment are expressed more explicitly. Through Judgment resources, journalists make quite negative assessments on China. The characteristics of Appreciation are studied in terms of the targets appraised. Instances of Reaction take the largest proportion, whereas, instances of Valuation take the least proportion.3. By comparing attitudinal appraisal resources in Business Column and Opinion Column, the author find there is a higher frequency of occurrence of appraisal resources in Opinion Column than that in Business Column. Writers of Opinion Column are more inclined to employ authorial affectual resources and Social Sanction than that of Business Column. In terms of Social Sanction, the appraisal resources in Opinion Column are more than those in Business Column. Under Appreciation, value of Reaction is employed more in Opinion Column than in Business Column.By adopting Marin's Appraisal Theory, the researcher of this study endeavors to uncover the hidden ideologies of New York Times'reports towards China. We can conclude that American news media is not so objective as it claims. Those reports attempt to spread "China threat" theory, and China's image and our currency policy are distorted. And this study is supposed to broaden the research scope of Appraisal Theory and to enable us to be better-informed about the underlying meaning of media texts. |
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