A Contrastive Study Of Commentary Markers As Attitudinal Resources In News Discourse

As one important aspect of lexical pragmatic research, commentary pragmatic markers are indispensable inEnglish discourse. It includes some fixed vocabulary or expressions such as some conjunction, adverbials, moodparticles, phrases or sentences to express the speakers’ communication purpose, motivation or attitude. Thescholars abroad have studied pragmatic markers since1970s. However, for the diversity on the theoreticalframework and the research orientation, many scholars have different ideas on the identification, classification,features and functions of the pragmatic markers.According to Fraser’s classification of pragmatic markers, this study aims at analyzing commentarypragmatic markers especially those served by adverbials in news reports about Huangyan Island Event. Theattitude system of Appraisal Theory is adopted to explore the syntactic patterns and attitudinal functions ofcommentary pragmatic markers in news discourse. The author sets up two datasets: Chinese dataset andAmerican dataset. The Chinese dataset is from China Daily, Xinhua net (English edition). And the Americandataset is from The New York Times and The Washington Post. With the help of linguistic analytical instrument—UAM CorpusTool2.8.7, detailed contrastive analysis are made between the two datasets by using bothqualitative and quantitative approaches.The findings show that the distribution pattern of commentary pragmatic markers follows the order ofsentence initial, sentence medial and sentence final. Except hearsay markers and mitigation markers, other typesof commentary pragmatic markers occur in both two datasets. However, the occurrence rate is not the same. Inthe two datasets, assessment markers appear the most frequently, which makes up54.0%and59.1%in Americanand Chinese datasets respectively. The possible reason is that commentary pragmatic markers occur in sentenceinitial to highlight the speakers’ attitude and evaluation. From perspective of attitude, the author finds that thereare more affect resources conveyed by commentary pragmatic markers in American dataset than those inChinese dataset. While judgment resources make up more in Chinese dataset than in American dataset. Forappreciation resources, the both datasets share the similar distribution. The reason why such languagephenomenons occur lies in the different stance on this issue. The Chinese reporters incline to make evaluationfrom perspective of the norm of social behavior to safeguard state sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity andsecurity. However, as indirect participants of this dispute, American reporters tend to involve their personalemotion in reports. In addition, the differences in the usage of attitudinal resources between two datasets reflect the different cultural and political ideologies of two countries.By adopting Appraisal Theory as framework, the thesis makes a contrastive study of commentary pragmaticmarkers as attitudinal resources in news discourses, hoping to make some contribution to the study of pragmaticmarkers and analysis of cultural-cross discourses. However, some limitations such as subjectivity still exist inthat interpretation of appraisal meaning is related to the readers’ ideology and values closely.