Realization Of Attitudinal Resources In Public Crisis News Commentary

In recent years, the frequent occurrence of public crisis events such as SARS, school bus accidents, collapses of bridges and buildings, train collisions have aroused a great many commentaries on public crisis events. The public crisis news commentary focuses on social issues to wield influence in public opinion as well as provides policy makers and decision makers valuable referential suggestions to make comprehensive and objective assessment at crisis management. Meanwhile, news commentary also performs the supervision functions in urging the effective solutions of the crisis.At present, more news commentary researches at home and abroad are focusing on economic and political texts; by contrast, researches about public crisis news commentary are not that much. In linguistic domain, Appraisal-based attitudinal researches are mainly focused on investigating English news discourse instead of Chinese. Target and attitude relation based investigation on Chinese Public crisis news commentaries are few.This thesis applies Martin&White’s Appraisal theory (2005) and Bloom’s (2011) proposal for target as its theoretical framework to further reveal the realization features of attitudes and the semantic relation between the targets of Chinese public crisis news commentary and their attitudinal resources. The news commentary texts about Wenzhou bullet train collision are chosen as research data with qualitative and quantitative methods to present the distribution features of each sub-categories of attitudinal resources and their subtypes of targets.The thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter is introduction. The research motivation, research objective, research questions, research methodology, research significance and organization of the thesis are presented. Chapter two gives a close reviews on the previous studies of news commentary and appraisal-based work at home and abroad. Chapter three introduces the attitude subsystems of Martin&White’s Appraisal theory (2005) and Bloom’s (2011) definition of "target". Chapter four is the data analysis section. This chapter illustrates the realization of attitudinal resources in different subtypes of targets. Chapter five is results and discussion section. Chapter six is conclusion.The paper shows firstly that judgement resources are more deployed to express news evaluators’attitude, opinion, and stance in attitudinal target in CPC news commentaries, in which negative attitudinal resources are more applied than positive ones. Secondly, the resources of affects, judgement and appreciation are distinctively distributed in different types of targets. For example, more Appreciation resources are employed to evaluate target type of "life and insecurity" than affectual and judgement resources, and more judgement resources are deployed to evaluate the target type "rescue actions" than affectual and appreciation resources. Lastly, the distribution of attitudinal resources is closely related to the nature of different types of target. It is found that among eleven subtypes of targets, the attitudinal resources towards targets of "accident investigation and solutions" appears most, where various attitudinal resources, including positive and negative affectual, judgement and appreciation resources are deployed to express their attitudes. In addition, commentators mainly hold positive attitudes towards target types of "accident investigation and solutions" and "rescue actions", but hold negative attitudes towards target types of "causes of accident" and "impact of accident"The research of attitudinal realization of Chinese public crisis news commentary is not only conductive in constructing and desconstructing crisis texts from aspect of attitude and target analysis, but also meaningful to public opinion research work, and even can provide referential suggestions or solutions for crisis management.