| Based on Martin’s Appraisal Theory, this study explores engaging principle of language users in thebroadcast news discourse which were selected from the website. The author combines quantitative andqualitative methods to analyze the data. The Appraisal Theory is the new development in the interpersonalmeaning of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is based on the discourse semantic study and it is alsoa new theoretical framework of discourse in the evaluation of resources. This theory provides a new perspectivefor the research of interpersonal meaning. The Appraisal Theory includes three subsystems: Attitude,Engagement, and Graduation. The engagement system negotiates the interaction between various positions andviews. The engagement resources could be considered as an interpersonal strategy. The speaker or the authorcan use the resource to alienate or associate with the potential listeners.Broadcast news reports hot issues in the society. It involves in all aspects of social life, such as politics,economy, culture, sports, etc. Broadcast news is one of the approaches to obtain the social hot events; it occupiesan important position in the news media. The thesis analyzes the broadcast news discourse from the point viewof engagement. The author tries to explore the distribution and function of the engagement resources in thebroadcast news.The thesis selects20pieces of sports broadcast news discourses from the official website of VOA and BBC.Little attention has been paid to the analysis of the broadcast news by the previous researchers, so the authorchooses broadcast news as the data, and this is also a creation of the thesis. All these discourses are reports onthe2012London Olympic Games. The author used the20selected sports broadcast news discourses as thecorpus to explore features of the engagement resources in the reports of2012Olympic Games and to find outhow speakers use the engagement resources to negotiate with the potential listeners. Combinations ofquantitative and qualitative methods are used in the thesis. Quantitative methods used The UAM Corpus Tool tofind out the distribution and the frequency of each engagement resource. Qualitative methods are the analysis ofhow each engagement resources play its role to establish the relationship with the potential listeners. This studyaims to explore the distribution of each engagement resource in the broadcast news discourse, as well as toanalyze the realization of the function of each resource.Through the analysis, the author comes to the conclusion that the expansive resources of the engagementare widely used in the sports broadcast news discourse. Entertain resources comes to the first place, andacknowledge resources the second. The distribution of the resources has close relationship with the objectivity of the news. Different Appraisal values are selectively and strategically used in the discourse to better realize itsfunction and to better serve the purpose of interacting with the potential listeners. It has great significance toapply the Appraisal Theory into the broadcast news discourse. Studying engagement resources in the broadcastnews plays an important role in further understanding of the English news. The thesis provides a newperspective to the study of the interpersonal meaning, and it has significance to the learning of English listening. |
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