A Study Of Attitudes In Pulitzer Prize-winning International Reporting

News discourse is an important field of linguistic studies. For a long time,in-depth researches about news reports have been conducted by linguists from variousperspectives and many valuable findings have been obtained. In digging out theattitudes of news reports, Appraisal Theory, which was proposed by Martin and otherscholars in the1990s, is deemed as a very influential theory. It includes threesubsystems: attitude, engagement and graduation, and it has become an effectivedevice in analyzing attitude. Since its birth, Appraisal Theory has been widely used tostudy news by researchers abroad and at home.Pulitzer Prize is the highest journalistic award in America and it includes14categories. But in the field of linguistics of China, Pulitzer-winning journalistic workshaven‘t aroused enough attention. This thesis, by combining both qualitative andquantitative methods, will make use of subsystems of attitude in Appraisal Theory tostudy the distribution of attitudinal resources in Pulitzer Prize-winning internationalreporting. Through this study, the author hopes to find out the stance the Americanreporters prefer to take when reporting international affairs.The author collects Pulitzer-winning international reporting from2000to2012.In2001and2005, there are two newspapers getting this award respectively, so thecorpus contains15texts in total and the number of words is36877. Major findingswhich are obtained so far by the present study are as follows. Firstly, appreciationresources take the first place, judgment ranks the second, and the number of affectresources is the smallest. This indicates that American journalists focus more eyes onevaluation on external world and human‘s behavior than affectual responses whenreporting international affairs. Meanwhile, in the three subsystems of attitude,negative resources outnumber positive ones, which can be explained from America‘smuckraking tradition in its journalistic field. Secondly, according to the number ofoccurrence, the four affect resources can be ranked from high to low as in/security,un/happiness, dis/inclination and dis/satisfaction. Except dis/inclination, the otherthree subsystems of affect display more negative resources than positive resources.Since the selected reports are all negative reports, reporters tend to use dis/inclinationresources to express people‘s desire to escape the miserable situations. So unlike theother three subsystems of affect, more positive dis/inclination resources are employed.Thirdly, in judgment system, more social sanction is exploited than social esteem, and negative resources outweigh positive ones. This shows that Pulitzer Prize-winninginternational reporting prefers to make judgments from the perspective of socialsanction, and these judgments are mostly severe negative evaluation. Fourthly, inappreciation, the three subsystems are ranked according to occurrence as valuation,reaction, composition and their negative resources exceed positive ones. This showsPulitzer winning-international reporting tends to evaluate from the perspective ofsocial valuation. Fifthly, when the reports involve China, Russia and Pakistan, morejudgment resources are used, but when they cover Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq andMexico, more appreciation resources are used. There are also some differences ofattitudinal distribution on different topics within the same country. When the reportsare dealing with the issues of human rights and terrorism, more judgment resourcesare employed, and when the reports focus on the miserable situations brought bydiseases, famine and war, more appreciation resources are adopted.The present study can not only fill the gap in this field, but also bring somepractical significance by enlightening on the teaching of news reports.