A Study Of The Interpersonal Metafunction In The New Reports On The Opening Ceremony Of London2012Olympic Games

As a main means of mass media, the most typical feature of news report is toreport the event at home and abroad to the public in time. It’s generally considered tobe objective and impartial. Actually, under the different ideologies, the news mediamay report the same fact from different perspectives, thus impact on the judgmentsand attitudes of the reader. So the analysis of the realization of interpersonalmeta-function in the news report can help us to understand the deeper meaning behindthe news report, and it can even help us to establish a possible model for the properinterpersonal discourse.Under the basic framework of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics,Martin’s Appraisal Theory is also employed to explore the interpersonal functionhidden behind the news reports. By creating a corpus from the twenty pieces of newsreports on the opening ceremony of London Olympics, this thesis is conducted frommood system, modality system and the three levels of Appraisal Theory-attitude,engagement and graduation. In the mood system, the focus is the choices of thesubjects and the predicate verbs in the news discourse. In the modality system, theanalysis is concentrated on the role of the different modal verbs. In the system ofattitude, engagement and graduation, the focus is moved to the percentage andfunction carried by these three systems in the news discourse.The conclusions drawn from the present study are as follows:(1) Under theanalysis of mood system, the choices of the subjects in the twenty pieces of newsreports mainly focus on the third person pronoun in the declarative sentences. Thereason for this choice is that in order to state the objective fact and affect the reader,the third person pronoun can separate the reporter himself from the description of theevent. As the news reports are used for stating the events, which has already happened, so the past tense is largely adopted. The adjuncts like mood adjunct and commentadjunct are used to affect the reader’s evaluation subtly.(2) From the aspect of themodality, the analysis focuses on the modal verbs. The medium modal auxiliary“will/would” and low modal auxiliary “can” are used much more than other modalverbs. It’s mainly because that using such kind of modal verbs can express thereporters’ views in a gentle way and make space for other possibilities. Via thechoices of different modal verbs, the reporters establish the authority of their reportsand avoid the over absolute.(3) From the perspective of appraisal resources, theengagement resources take the highest percentage and the attitude resources are in thesecond place. The reporters quote a number of direct discourse from the third party toavoid implanting their personal emotions. As a core of Appraisal Theory, the attituderesources are scaled by the degree of the engagement.