Study On Stance Of BBC And Daily Mail In China-related Reports In2012London Olympic Games Analysis From The Markedness Of Token-value Configuration

The concept of Token and Value was first introduced to Systemic-Functional Grammar by Halliday in1967as a way to characterize identifying clause in addition to Identified-Identifier relationship. Identifying clause reflects the speaker’s way of construing the world of experience in terms of voice and information. The configuration of Token-Value (Tk-V1) and Identified-Identifier (Id-Ir) generates four possibilities of three different modes of markedness. According to Thompson (1996), certain selection of Tk-V1and Id-Ir configuration (Tk-VIC) reflects the speaker’s concerns and values in given situations, with the marked ones as a special form which highlights the speaker’s stance. Therefore, study on the markedness of Tk-V1C could help make clear the speaker’s intention and stance whereby to facilitate the audience’s understanding.Olympic Games practiced nowadays is a showcase of a nation’s power and the media play an important role of recording the big event. Media reports can be identified to have a large quantity of identifying clauses. However, different media have different news agenda in support of their own countries when reporting since national prestige is involved. Discussion on the markedness of Tk-VIC of identifying clauses in sports reports therefore could enable the audience to see through the mass media, avoiding being misled by news bias.Since most of the previous studies focused on revealing the nature of Tk-VIC because of its complexity. The author, inspired by Thompson, who points out the practical significance of Tk-VIC, attempts to explore the British media’s stance in China-related reports in2012London Olympic Games based on the analysis of the markedness of Tk-VIC. The present thesis first discusses the features of Tk-V1C in corpus by quantitative approach, then analyzes major influencing factors of the Tk-V1C, and finally explores the possible stance British media take by employing Tk-V1C with different extent of markedness.Major findings could be concluded as follow based on the present study:first, intensive clause is the most frequently used one of the three subtypes of identifying clause and therefore is the prototype of the study; second, the major influencing factors of Tk-VIC in corpus are anaphoric restriction, thematic progression and thematic equative, end-weight and end-focus principles; third, selecting Tk-VIC with different extent of markedness reflects the mass media’s specific intention and stance which could be generalized as fairness of reports on China’s performance in China-dominated events, suspicion of China’s breakthroughs in west-dominated events and critique of China’s sports training regime.