A Contrastive Analysis Of Engagement Resources In The News Reports Of China Daily And New York Times About Japan Earthquake: An Appraisal Theory Approach

News reports have played an important role in people’s daily life. In recent years, as natural disastersincrease at home and abroad, the studies of natural disaster news become more and more. In particular, theearthquakes have attracted people’s great attention. This thesis chooses English news reports about Japanearthquake as its material.Appraisal Theory is the development of interpersonal meaning of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Thistheory is a new framework and consists of three subsystems, namely, Attitude, Graduation and Engagement. TheEngagement system concentrates on the interaction and negotiation of different opinions and stances, and it hasgreat influence on evaluating issues, adopting stances and managing interpersonal positions and relationships.This thesis attempts to explore the frequencies and different distributions of Engagement resources in Englishnews reports about Japan earthquake from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.The author of this thesis selects twenty-six pieces of English news reports about Japan earthquake fromChina Daily and New York Times. At first, all the Engagement resources in these news reports are marked out,and the news reports are divided into two corpora according to which newspaper they belong to. Then, with thehelp of linguistic analytical instrument—UAM Corpus Tool2.8.4, detailed contrastive analysis are madebetween the two corpora by using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, aiming to find out the similaritiesand differences in the usages of Engagement resources in the news reports from the two newspapers about Japanearthquake. Through the data analysis, we find thatThe similarities between the two newspapers are: both China Daily and New York Times use more Expandtype than Contract type. In Contract type, Counter is the most favorably applied value, and Deny is also used alot, only next to Counter, while Concur, Pronounce and Endorse all together make up a small proportion in bothnewspapers. In Expand type, the most used value is Acknowledge in both newspapers, and Entertain is used a lot,while Distance is used only a little. These similarities show that both China Daily and New York Times follow therules of news reports and they are basically objective about Japan earthquake.The differences between the two newspapers are: The usages of Counter values and Acknowledge valuesare different in the two newspapers. In Expand system, China Daily uses more Acknowledge values than NewYork Times. In Contract system, New York Times uses more Counter values than China Daily. That is to say,China Daily is more objective about Japan earthquake while New York Times pays more attention to build arelationship with the readers trying to persuade the readers to change their previous mind and agree with the writers of the news reports. Actually, the differences in the usages of Engagement resources between the twonewspapers are derived from the different cultures and politics of the two countries.From the perspective of Appraisal Theory, this thesis attempts to make a contrastive study of theEngagement resources in the news reports of China Daily and New York Times about Japan earthquake, hopingmaking some contributions to other genres especially to news about earthquakes and to the application ofAppraisal Theory in discourse analysis, therefore providing pedagogical implications to the writing and readingof news discourse. However, this thesis still has its limitations.