On Attitude Resources In NBA News From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Nowadays people live in the age of information and news report is one of the most efficient ways ofspreading news. Sports news, especially NBA news reports, is one of the important branches of newsreports. Since Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian’s joining in NBA, more and more Chinese people begin to haveinterest in NBA news reports. As the important genre, sports news reports have attracted the attention oflinguists. But the previous research of NBA news reports focused on basketball terms, lexical items,stylistics while the appraisal study of it has seldom been made before.Appraisal theory is made up of three sub-categories: attitude, engagement and graduation. Attitudecan be further divided into affect, judgment and appreciation. Based on appraisal theory, this research triesto analyze NBA news reports from the perspective of attitude resources. As research objectives, NBA newsreports have been randomly selected from China Daily and America local newspapers-Washington Post,Los Angeles and CBS. And two small corpora have been built: China Daily NBA news reports corpus(CNNRC,40,000tokens) and America NBA news reports corpus (ANNRC,120,000tokens). This studycombines quantitative and qualitative research methods. And datum are extracted according to the methodof normalization frequency. With the help of analytical tools, a comprehensive analysis and comparison ofthe two corpora is made.Through the analysis and comparison of the two corpora, the overall distributional features of attituderesources are: positive attitude resources take up the largest proportion in the two corpora; Besides, thedistribution of the three sub-categories of attitude in the two corpora is similar: judgment values take upthe largest part of attitude resources, followed by affect and appreciation respectively; while the differences of the two corpora are: CNNRC employs more judgment values than ANNRC, with52.05%and43.90%respectively. On the contrary, there are more affect and appreciation values in ANNRC. On the other hand,the following findings can be concluded from the perspective of the three sub-categories of attituderesources:(1) Affect: Almost90%of affect values in the two corpora are positive; Besides, the differenceof the two corpora in the choice of top five lexical realization of affect shows that Chinese are inclined toemploy adjectives to express their affect while native speakers prefer verbs.(2) Judgment: Almost80%ofjudgment values in the two corpora are positive; In terms of social esteem, the similarity between the twocorpora lies in: capacity values account for the largest part of judgment, followed by normality and tenacityrespectively; while the differences are that American newspapers prefer more capacity values, but ChinaDaily employs relatively more normality and tenacity values; In terms of social sanction, the two corporaare total same: propriety values take up the majority proportion of social sanction and there’s nearly noveracity values.(3) Appreciation: positive appreciation values prevail in the two corpora; the similaritiesbetween the two corpora in terms of the sub-types of appreciation values are: composition values accountfor the largest proportion while the amount of reaction and valuation is nearly equal; Besides, there’s nonegative valuation values in the two corpora. The differences of the two corpora are: there are morecomposition values in China Daily than that in American newspapers. Moreover, it is worth mentioningthat the top five lexical items chosen by CNNRC are almost the same as ANNRC’ choice. It indicates thatthe English level of Chinese writers is close to native speakers’.Through the comprehensive analysis and comparison, this study makes readers realize the differencesof culture and ideology between China and Western, and therefore improve the appreciating and Englishlearning level of readers. Besides, this study applies appraisal theory to the research of NBA news reportsand tries to broaden the applied field of appraisal theory, which is helpful for the further development of this theory.