| Interpersonal function is a fundamental metafunction of language; even the mostobjective language is abounded with interpersonal meanings, which reflects the interaction ornegotiation of different kinds of values or positions in the discourse. Evaluation plays asignificant part in expressing the interpersonal meanings. This dynamic view on languageintrigues an enthusiastic study on the interaction between writers and readers in the fields ofrhetorical studies, functional grammar and so on. The development of Appraisal Theory(Martin2000) has opened up areas of research on interpersonal meanings that were largelyneglected within Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Appraisal framework has beenapplied to the analysis of media discourse, including hard news, news stories and newscomments (Rick Iedema, Susan Feez and Peter White1994; Peter White2000,2001; J. R.Martin&David Rose2003). Among these, a large part of attention has been paid to newscomments. Therefore, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation systems in news comments areworth studying.The previous studies pay more attention to the news comments in certain aspects,including political news, social news, financial news and so on. As a kind of news, civil newshas a close relation with people’s life, but the researches of the comments on civil newshaven’t been paid much attention from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. So this thesis triesto explore the interpersonal meanings in the comments of civil news within Appraisal Theory.Based on the theoretical framework of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation systems inAppraisal Theory by Martin (2000), the study aims to find out firstly, the distribution ofappraisal resources in the comments of civil news; secondly, how the commentators properlyopen up a negotiation space with the other voices by using these appraisal resources, in otherwords, how the interpersonal meanings are realized through these appraisal resources; thirdly,what kinds of functions these resources perform in the comments of civil news.The samples used in the study are10pieces of the comments of civil news. The10pieces of news comments are chosen from the electronic version of China Daily. Both qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches are applied in analyzing the comments ofcivil news. The research procedures can be showed in the following: first, attitude,engagement, graduation resources in the comments of civil news will be explored; second,frequencies and distributions of appraisal resources will be calculated and presented in theform of tables; third, the results will be analyzed in regard to the reasons of their differentdistributions. By analyzing the corpus, the thesis mainly explains the role of the appraisalresources in civil news, in other words, how the appraisal resources provide a speech platformfor the common people especially for the vulnerable groups and how the appraisal resourcesharmonize the conflict among different social classes so as to attain the goal of unitingdifferent social classes and construct a harmonious society.The main findings are that the distribution of the appraisal resources in civil news isunbalanced, which is determined by the role of the resources and the features of civil news.Interpersonal meanings are realized through the appraisal resources in civil news. The usingof appraisal resources adjusts and negotiates the interests of different social classes andcontributes to the construction of a harmonious society. |
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