| On talking about news, people will think of objectivity inevitably. However，isnews really objective? People begin to doubt now about this because the authors of thenews cannot avoid having personal emotions during their writings, which can lead thelacking of objectivity of the news. Therefore, this study proposes a bold hypothesis thatnews is not objective and there are many affective meanings in news. In order to provethe hypothesis, the key is to find out how the news manifests the subjectivity, in otherwords, how the news expresses the affective meanings. Meanwhile, according to thetypes of news, news includes news report and news comment. In order to make thestudy more comprehensive, this study also needs to figure out whether different types ofnews will have differences in the ways by which they express affective meanings.In order to find out the ways the affective meanings express, we need to work outthe following points: first, whether the affective meanings in the news discourse areexpressed through explicit way like words or phrases or through implicit way likesentences or paragraphs? Second，whether the expression of affective meanings isthrough the approach that the author expressing his/her emotions directly or through theauthor retelling others utterances or describing the events themselves to express thehis/her emotions indirectly? Last, what kinds of emotions the author has? Are theaffective meanings expressed in the news positive or negative, or happy/unhappy,secure/insecure, satisfied/dissatisfied? However, those affective resources, which referto words, sentences, or even paragraphs that directly or indirectly convey the author’semotions in explicit or implicit ways in news discourse, are just the research domains ofthe Affect system in Appraisal Theory (AT). Affect is a framework for mapping feelingsand is what this study need as the theoretical foundation to analyze the news discourses.In order to explore the similarities and dissimilarities of the expressive ways ofaffective meanings and the types of affective resources in two kinds of news discourses:reports and comments, and in order to make the data have more accuracy andcomparability, this study chooses one month’s economic news reports and economicnews comments from First Financial Daily as data. Both qualitative and quantitativeapproaches are used to examine affective resources in this study. And results show thatin news reports, ways to express affective meanings are mainly implicit through theapproach of events’ affect; and in news comments, ways to express affective meanings are mainly implicit through the approach of authorial’ affect. And the main types ofaffective resources in both discourses are both insecurity and dissatisfaction.Through the contrastive study, this study plays an important role in furtherunderstanding the economic news from the perspective of AT. By the analysis ofconcrete and representative news discourse, the study can help people to realize theessence of news clearly, and improve the ability of appreciation towards news forpeople. Meanwhile, the study hopes that it can contribute to the current researches ofDA of economic news from the perspective of AT, which is still in great shortage in thisaspect in China. And the study also hopes to contributes to the applications of AT andaffect system in DA. |
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