Patterns Of Attitude In Chinese Editorials

While language can be used to convey information and represent the external world, it can express feelings, attitude and stance in our internal world as well. In1990s, Martin and White introduced Appraisal theory in detail, which expanded Inter-personal meta-function in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and was widely adopted in the systemic analysis of evaluation in language. Based on Appraisal theory, this study analyzes Attitude patterns in Chinese editorial texts which are collected from People’s Daily, from January2009to January2010, including60texts,100,000characters.Appraisal theory includes three subsystems, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Attitude is concerned with our feelings, containing Affect, Judgement and Appreciation. Affect is at the heart of Attitude; Judgement and Appreciation are institutionalized feelings. This thesis studies how the writers of editorials express their attitude and opinions towards the important regulations made by Communist Party of China (CPC) and Chinese government, important festivals (for example, National Day, New Year) and events happening in China.This research analyzes the Attitude patterns of Chinese editorial from three perspectives:the kinds of Attitude (mode and loading), the characteristics of Attitude and the syntactic patterns of Attitude. The analytical results show that in terms of kinds of Attitude, Judgement resources are most frequently used, including338instances, Appreciation contains213instances and Affect includes only17instances. In terms of loading of Attitude, positive Attitude resources are much more than those of negative ones, accounting for548instances and18instances respectively. As for mode of expressions, all the instances of Attitude are explicitly expressed. Judgement resources are mostly used to evaluate the behavior of group and crowd. Instances of social sanction (315) are much more than those of social esteem (23). There are three main syntactic patterns in Judgement. Appreciation is used to evaluate the laws, regulations and natural phenomena. In Appreciation system. Valuation is mostly adopted, with106instances, Reaction being second with98instances and Composition being the least with only9instances. Appreciation is mainly realized through relational process. And there are two main syntactic patterns in Appreciation. Affect is adopted to express human feelings. Triggers are obligatory elements, with Emoters being optional. Affect is mainly realized through mental process. There is only one syntactic pattern in Affect.This study systemically analyzes the syntactic patterns of Attitude in Chinese editorials, which perfects Appraisal theory to some extent, broadens its application, provides new analytical framework for Chinese discourse analysis and promotes the combination and co-development of Chinese and English discourse analysis.