A Study On Engagement Resources In Chinese And American Television Interview From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

In recent years, with the continuous development of mass media, the TVinterview programs as a mass media become more and more popular. It has graduallyreceived more attention because of its influence on people’s daily life; meanwhile itattracts scholars’ attraction both at home and abroad. Previous studies on TVinterview are mainly conducted through two approaches, the linguistic approach andthe mass media approach (the non-linguistic approach), which to large extentprovided us with a better understanding of this particular genre. And generallyspeaking, from the perspective of linguistics, an amount of relevant research is mostlymade within the framework of discourse analysis, pragmatics, and critical discourseanalysis, which to some extent pay little attention to the fact that different voices ofthis genre interact with each other. Expressing their ideas and stances, speakers notonly show their own ideas to each other, they also negotiate and discuss these ideasindirectly with the audience in the whole process of interview communication.Therefore, speakers will make efforts to persuade audience to share and accept theirideas and stances by employing some sort of heteroglossic engagement resources.Appraisal Theory provides systemically a new perspective for the study andexploration of heteroglossic produced in the employing of engagement resources.Appraisal Theory, developed from the interpersonal studies withinSystemic-Functional Linguistics, is a new theoretical framework. The theory isconcerned with the linguistic resources for and by which texts/speakers come toexpress, negotiate and naturalize particular inter-subjective and ultimately ideologicalpositions (White,1998). Appraisal theory consists of three subsystems, namely,Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. And each subsystem also includes a few partsor subsystems. The heteroglossic engagement system mainly focuses on the lexicaland grammatical resources employed by writers to express their attitudes and stances，and adjusts language users’ responsibilities for what they spoke or wrote.This thesis explores the employing and distribution of heteroglossic engagementresources and how these resources help speakers to realize the interpersonal meaningin the process of communication in Chinese and American TV interview based on theengagement system. The author of the present study picks out6interview episodesfrom Dialogue as Chinese TV interview research data and6interview episodes from Larry King Live as American TV interview research data respectively. Bothquantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted to make a detailed analysis withthe help of the statistical tool—Corpus Tool, after which the major findings can besummarized as follows:Both speakers in Chinese and American television interview employ all kinds ofheteroglossic engagement resources and they have certain similarities and differencesin selecting the subsystem resources. Both speakers in Chinese and Americantelevision interview tend to employ more ‘expand’ resources， especially those‘entertain’ resources and ‘acknowledge’ resources, than ‘contract’ resources to showthat their ideas may be just one of the possibilities and they allow other voices and thenegotiation of different voices, by which they can open up the space for dialogue. Itindicates that in order to successfully achieve the communication purpose andcontribute to speakers’ communication in the process of communication, speakers willtend to use a lot of ‘expand’ resources to allow other different voices and thenegotiation between them rather than restrict or close down the space for dialogue byopposing or suppressing other different voices. Speakers will choose more ‘disclaim’resources than ‘proclaim’ resources when they emphasize their attitudes and stances.However, there are some differences between ‘deny’ resources and ‘counter’resources by which speakers chose to oppose or suppress the different ideas. Speakersin Chinese television interview nearly employ the number of the ‘deny’ resourcessame as that of the ‘counter’ resources, however, in American television interview, thenumber of ‘deny’ resource exceeds than that of ‘counter’ resources. It shows thatAmerican speakers tend to express their ideas and stancse by directly refutingprevious ideas when they want to express and emphasize their ideas in the case ofopposing different ideas, while Chinese speakers express their ideas more modestlyand implicitly. This difference may be caused by the different cultural backgroundsand different thinking patterns.The author makes a tentative study to analyze the distribution of engagementresources both in Chinese and American TV interview with the appraisal theory,which is helpful for broadening the application sphere of the engagement system andproviding insights into television interview discourse, including its generic andstylistic characteristics. This thesis also contributes to learning of more aboutengagement resources selecting. In addition, the author hopes this study can makesome contribution to the application of appraisal theory in the television interview discourse and provide a tentative approach for the study of the application of appraisaltheory in other discourse.