| The Appraisal Theory, developed from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, isregarded as an interpersonal system at the level of the discourse semantics. This theory fallsinto three subsystems: Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation, the resources of which focus onhow the writers/speakers adopt these appraisal resources to convey their emotion, judgment,and evaluation. And among the three subcategories, the Engagement resources are frequentlyused to investigate how the writers/speakers employ these linguistic resources to negotiatewith their readers/listeners, and to align with those who share their views and distance thosewho have different views.Economic news covers the reports concerned with the latest economic policies, businessevents and natural economic phenomena of human society, and plays an important role inpeople’s daily life. Based on the Engagement system of the Appraisal Theory, the author inthis thesis tries to explore features of the whole Engagement resources in English economicnews, finds out frequency of each engagement resource, and analyzes how the news writersemploy these resources to negotiate and align with readers in order to achieve the writingpurposes.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed in this thesis to study theEngagement resources of20pieces of economic news from The Wall Street Journal. From theanalyzed statistics, it can be seen that the resources of dialogical expansion (58.4%) are morefrequently used to some extent than those of dialogical contraction (41.6%). Compared withthe Proclaim resources (5.5%), the news writers hold more affection for the resources ofDisclaim (36.1%), Entertain (26.4%), and Attribute (32%), and the Disclaim resources areemployed most often. Within the smallest categories of Engagement, the Acknowledge (31.2%) resources have the highest frequency; the resources of Concur (18.4%) and Deny(17.7%) have the similar percentage in some degree; the Distance (0.8%) resources are leastused. While these Engagement resources have different frequencies and serve differentpurposes in the economic news, they are all employed and negotiate with the addressers andaddressees, and to reach an alignment between the writers and readers, and to achievesuccessful verbal communication with each other.Furthermore, this thesis explores how these various Engagement resources are distributedand realized in the economic news, and the analysis of Engagement resources in Englisheconomic news can achieve the theoretical and practical significance simultaneously. Fromthe theoretical perspective, the thesis conducts a study on the applicability and realization ofEngagement resources in the discourse analysis of economic news discourse to ensure itsobjectivity. Thus, the thesis can be said to provide valid data for the future research in thiskind of discourse analysis. From the practical perspective, through the analysis of thelinguistic characteristics in economic news discourse, such as the features and distribution ofEngagement resources, this thesis makes a specific analysis of the quantitative statistics of theEngagement resources, which will deepen people’s understanding of the reporting skills of theeconomic news. The analysis of Engagement resources in English economic news can alsohelp the readers appreciate the news discourse, and help the writers deliver more reliable,excellent and effective economic news in the future. |
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