A Contrastive Study On The Attitudinal Resources Of The Reports On The Fourth Brics Summit—from The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory is a new development of the interpersonal function of Systemic-Functional Linguistics, which was put forward and developed by James Martin and other linguists in the1990s. Compared with Systemic-Functional Linguistics that focuses on syntactic level, Appraisal Theory mainly studies on the lexical level. Appraisal Theory consists of three subsystems:attitude, engagement, and graduation. This thesis is based on the attitudinal system.BRIC, an acronym representing the four countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, accepted South Africa as the fifth member country in Dec.,2012, and is called "BRICS" afterwards. The Fourth BRICS Summit was held in New Delhi, India on March29,2012. As the representatives of mainstream media, China Daily and The New York Times reported this summit.Apparently, these news reports belong to the category of political news, so they are timely and have political features. This thesis conducts a contrastive study of the attitudinal resources in20news reports on the Fourth BRICS Summit from China Daily and The New York Times, and aims at finding out the similar and different distributive features of attitudinal resources, summarizing the different interpersonal meanings conveyed by the two newspapers, and finally explaining the reasons for these differences. In order to achieve these purposes, the attitudinal resources are collected and marked out with the help of UAM Corpus Tool based on the attitudinal system. Then, a quantitative study is conducted to study distributive features of the resources. Afterwards, a qualitative study is conducted and the interpersonal meanings are revealed. There are several findings. First, judgement and appreciation are more frequently used while the least frequently used type is affect. Besides, the ratio of judgement resources is higher than that of appreciation resources. Within the Attitudinal system of news reports from China Daily, the frequently used types are: valuation> capacity> tenacity> propriety> security. From The New York Times, the frequently used types are:capcity> composition> valuation>tenacity>veracity. There are much more positive attitudinal resources than negative ones in the reports from China Daily while there are much more negative attitudinal resources than positive ones in the reports from The New York Times. As for part of speech, the two newspapers share similarities as follows. Affect attitudinal resources are mainly presented in the forms of noun and verb. Judgement attitudinal resources are mainly presented in the form of verb. Appreciation attitudinal resources are mainly presented in the form of adjective. Besides, there are some differences. The statistics show that verbs and adjectives are predominantly applied in the reports from China Daily while The New York Times mainly uses adjectives, verbs and nouns to indicate interpersonal meaning. Second, the two newspapers convey different interpersonal meanings. The Chinese reporters are supportive and believe the Fourth BRICS Summit is successful while the reporters of The New York Times are doubtful and magnify some problems and the internal contradictions between BRICS members. Third, the reason why China Daily and The New York Times convey different interpersonal meanings about the Fourth BRICS Summit may be that they have different political backgrounds and ideology.The thesis is dedicated to discuss the applicability of Appraisal Theory in analyzing political news, which serves as a supplement for the present application of Appraisal Theory. Though the Fourth BRICS Summit has been studied from the perspectives of political science, economic field and sociology, this thesis endeavors to create a new perspective of interpersonal meaning to study this summit.