| As the cultural collision and misunderstanding become increasingly frequent, the understanding of different cultures is given more attention than ever before. Therefore, the study of intercultural communication seems particularly important. As one column of mass media, sports news is a powerful way to show the different social culture.On the field of Beijing and London Olympics, it was undoubted that Liu Xiang, known as the "Asian flyer", had captured worldwide attention. This paper employs the appraisal theory to study the English sports news about Liu xiang’s events. Appraisal theory, proposed by J.R. Martin and his colleagues, is a newly-developed lexico-grammatical framework for realizing interpersonal meaning in Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics. According to Martin and White, Appraisal theory concerns with the types of attitudes, the strength of the involved feelings and the ways in which values and readers aligned in the discourse. English sports news is full of attitudes and appraisal that writers and readers offer toward Liu xiang’s events in Beijing and London Olympics. Thus, appraisal theory, a newly-developed interpersonal functional theory, presents a proper framework to analyze the distributional features of appraisal resources in English sports news.The thesis takes the English sports news about Liu Xiang’s events in Beijing and London Olympics as the research object, to make a contrastive study about appraisal resources of Chinese and American English sports news based on discourse analysis, thus solving the two problems:(1) how are the distributional and engagement resources distributed in English sports news between China and American?(2) What roles do these resources play in English sports news? Furthermore, with the help of Schwartz’s value theory, the paper tries to give the cultural interpretation of distributional differences of appraisal theory in English sports news between China and America.Due to different cultural background, the distribution of appraisal resources is different in English sports news of China and America. The sixty sports news about Liu xiang’s events in Beijing and London Olympics have been selected from the well-know media in China and America. Then, the software-Acntconc is used to measure the distribution of appraisal resources, to make the distributional differences of these resources. Then, Schwartz’s value theory is applied to make cultural interpretation of the differences in English sports news.The paper concludes that distributional differences of appraisal resources are presented in the English sports news. In light of the attitude system, judgment resources are most frequently used in English sports news of America. However, affective evaluations are most applied in Chinese English sports news. In terms of engagement system, American sports news adopt more resources of dialogic contraction, but in Chinese English sports news, the resources of dialogic expansion are presented with the most percentage. Based on the cultural dimension, the distributional features can be interpreted by the Schwartz’s value theory. In Chinese English sports news, the cultural values of conservation and self-transcendence are presented to focus on the social safety, traditional harmony, universalism and benevolence. While in American sports news, the cultural dimensions of self-enhancement and openness to change are shown in order to stress individual success, ability and self-directed innovation of pursuing their dreams and creativity. |
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