British&American Mainstream Media Coverage Of Haiti Earthquake From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As a non-literary as well as a kind of discourse that reflects social practice, news discourse is the outcome of interaction between various kinds of ideologies and power management, arousing much concern in the field of Discourse Analysis. However, by reviewing, the author has found that many researches selected political news or war reports as their subjects. Other theme such as disaster news has been paid little attention to. Thus we will choose the catastrophic news, especially news about Haiti earthquake as the target of analysis.Appraisal Theory, put forward by Professor J. R. Martin in the1990s, is the development and extension of interpersonal meanings in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and contains three sub-systems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. It is the system of semantic resources used to explore, describe and explain the way in which language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construe textual personas and to manage interpersonal relationship. Till now, Appraisal theory has been expanded and improved by many scholars and applied to analyzing different genres of discourse texts. Various researches indicate that Appraisal theory is of great practical value. It can efficiently explore the appraisal resources in the language and make clear the language users’ attitude, viewpoint and stand point systemically. However, there are quite few researches which apply Appraisal theory to natural disaster news reports.The present study sets out to analyze British and American Mainstream Media Coverage (hereafter BAMMC) of Haiti earthquake which happened on12January2010. For this purpose, we respectively select ten related reports within the year of2010at random from each of the four British and American mainstream media-The Guardian, BBC, The New York Times and VOA as the corpus. However, since the workload is simply too great, the author just has made a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of sixteen reports within or around a month after the quake with the help of UAM corpus tool, aiming to probe how appraisal resources are distributed in catastrophic news and how media arouse readers" sympathy and resonance on the basis of objectively broadcasting the real fact and with the help of these evaluative resources so as to win more help for Haiti and Haitians.Through the research, this thesis has found that appraisal recourses are massively used but differently distributed in all reports we select. Research statistics in the massively-used attitude resources shows that the Appreciation items in the corpus are used the most frequently, followed by Judgment and then Affect. Besides, negative attitudinal values take up the primary proportion. Positive attitudes in the reports are mainly employed to appraise Haitian government and rescue teams from all over the world for efforts they have made after the earthquake and Haitians doggedly fighting against the catastrophe while negative attitudes to mirror the situation of Haiti and people’s misery there. As for Engagement, the reporters have used much more heterogloss than monogloss, which indicates they prefer to introduce various voices to enhance the objectivity and reality of the coverage while offering interest groups with word platform to express their thoughts. In Graduation, attitudinal meanings are graded and more of Graduation values are adopted to tune up the forces of attitudinal meaning. In addition, items of Force are found to be more than those of Focus and numerical expressions are widely-used. All above shows that reporters are inclined to take good advantage of raising resources to persuade the audience by letting them feel how cruelly the earthquake hurts the Haitians, so as to make readers know exactly how Haitians feel and thus arouse resonance of readers.In a word, the thesis attempts to conduct discourse analysis of natural disaster news reports on Haiti earthquake from the perspective of Appraisal theory, hoping to help enrich the tagged Corpus of discourse analysis and trying to explore how the media adopt appraisal resources to move readers, arouse their sympathy and eventually call for more help for disaster-stricken areas and the victims there.