A Comparative Study Of Engagement Resources In Chinese And American English Editoirals

As a subgenre of news discourse, editorials are timely comments on theimportant events happening both at home and abroad. They try to express thenewspaper’s attitudes and stances towards these events with the aim to guide thepublic opinions or appeal to readers to take actions. Many scholars have conductedresearches on editorials; however, their focuses are mainly on structural features orstylistics. This thesis is a tentative study of engagement resources in the Chinese andAmerican English editorials from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. It is hoped thatthe present study can provide a new approach for the comparative analysis of Englisheditorials.The theoretical framework of the present study is the heteroglossic engagementsystem within Appraisal Theory which is proposed and perfected by Martin and White.The heteroglossic engagement system is concerned with the lexical and grammaticalresources employed by writers to express their attitudes and stances and by whichwriters can form dialogues with readers. In order to compare the distribution featuresof heteroglossic engagement resources in Chinese and American English editorialsand further explore the engaging strategies preferred by them, the author of thepresent study carefully picks out30editorials from the official websites of ChinaDaily and New York Times, all of which are concerned about the international politicsand economy. With the help of the professional linguistic software (UAM CorpusTool V2.8.7), the present study has made both quantitative and qualitative analysesafter which the major findings are:The Chinese and American English editorials both adopt all kinds ofheteroglossic engagement resources and they have the same tendency in thesubsystem resources selecting. However, Chinese English editorials prefer to employmore contract resources, especially disclaim and pronounce resources; whileAmerican English editorials like expand resources better and entertain andacknowledge resources enjoy their preference. This shows that Chinese English editorials tend to suppress the dialogic space. They prefer to interpolate the text withmore subjective resources and reject the challenging voices in a directly negative way.Therefore, it can be seen that Chinese English editorials have a strong power inguiding the public opinions. By contrast, American English editorials prefer to openup the dialogic space. They love to use more factual resources and suggest that theiropinion is but one possibility. American English editorials allow the existence of thealternative positions. Comparatively speaking, American English editorials are gentlerin guiding the public opinions. After the thorough analyses, it is thought that theChinese and American English editorials belong to the same genre and have similarpurposes; moreover, the heteroglossic engagement system has its own consistentoperating mechanism. However, China and America have different cultural values,different mass media operating mechanism and different stances towards theinternational affairs. Therefore, Chinese and American English editorials have bothsimilarities and differences in their engaging strategies.In spite of some limitations, the present study still provides a new perspectivefor the analysis of the Chinese and American English editorials; in addition, it has alsoshed light upon the EFL teaching, especially on the newspaper reading.