A Comparative Study Of Graduation Resources In Chinese And American News

The missing of Malaysian Flight MH370on March8th2014is a catastrophe inhuman aviation history. It attracts the whole world’s attention. Within the first weeksince it was released, several authoritative media had made follow-up reports on thecase. Among them, both China Daily and New York Times delivered the latest newsto their readers at the rate of at least ten reports a day. Those articles, as news reportson a global calamity, are surely valuable materials for news discourse analysis. Thisstudy compares the similarities and differences between Chinese and Americanmedia about their attitude-expressing strategies via probing into the employment ofGraduation resources in their news reports.The theoretical framework of this study–Graduation system–stems from bothMartin&White’s appraisal theory and Hood’s supplement about Graduation system.As one of the three domains of appraisal theory, Graduation resources help expressattitude effectively by adjusting the gradability and preciseness of appraisallanguages. Graduation resources include some inherently scalable locutions orwords of typicality that reveal author’s attitudes and stances. Thirty news reports onMH370case are selected from China Daily and New York Times between March8thand March28thand they are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively by meansof linguistic annotating software–UAM Corpus Tool3.0. The major findings are:There are both similarities and differences about the distribution of Graduationresources in Chinese and American news reports. The similarities are:1) thedistribution of Force resources is larger than that of Focus resources, which meansboth Chinese media and American media prefer Force than Focus when adjusting thedegree of value or expressing attitudes.2) Within the Force sub-system, of bothmedia, the frequency of Quantity is the highest, with Intensity following, andEnhancement ranks the third place. The reason for this situation may be that, bothmedia quote a lot of data in order to keep persuasive and authoritative in the newsreports, which leads to the high frequency of Quantity resources that adjust data. Incontrast, in avoidance of subjectivity, the Intensity resources, which adjust quality appraisal, are less than Quantity resources. Then Enhancement resources are the leastbecause the processes that can inherently indicate efficiency are rare.3) Within theFocus sub-system, both media employ more Valeur resources than Fulfilmentresources. The reason for this situation may also lie in the lack of process resourcesand abundant value appraisal resources. The divergence is that the proportion ofIntensity in Force resources in Chinese news is higher than that in American news.That means Chinese reporters uses more Intensity resources than American reporters.The explanation for this lies in two aspects–the divergence of eastern/westerncultures and different stances of the two media. To be specific, American mediaendows news with the task of revealing truth; therefore the victims’ feelings are oflittle consideration, thus Intensity resources are of less use. In contrast, Chinesemedia pays more attention to the victims’ feelings because most missing passengersare Chinese. Chinese media emphasizes the media’s responsibility to console readersand to smooth grieving victims, thus more emotional words are used in the news asthe cause of more Intensity resources.The present study aims to help readers understand the interpersonal meanings inEnglish news and, at the same time provides a new angle for the comparativeanalysis of news discourse. Besides, this thesis could act as a record for this missingevent with the hope that the mystery could be solved in future.