A Research On Discursive Identity Construction From The Perspective Of Attitude In Addraisal Theory

Identity construction is an interesting topic for linguists. So far, most of the studies of identity construction in the linguistic field focus on how language users construct their own identities through the use of language while the study of how one’s identity is constructed by others is rare. Therefore, this paper studies how news discourse constructs one’s identity by taking chengguan as a case from the perspective of attitude in the appraisal theory.This thesis combines Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and the attitude system theory in Martin’s appraisal theory as the framework, and takes the news reports released on the Nandu.com from Nov.22,2012 to April 10,2014 as the data. It answers four questions:1) What attitudinal resources are employed in the news discourse? 2) What are the salient features of the employment of the attitudinal resources? 3) What kind of identity of chengguan has been constructed through these salient attitudinal features? 4) What are the possible causes of the employment of these attitudinal resources in chengguan’s identity construction?The research shows:1) the employment of the judgement attitude is predominate, accounting for 81% of all the attitudinal resources while that of the affect attitude and the appreciation attitude is relatively few, accounting for 14% and 5% respectively.2) As the appraised, chengguan and the victims are evaluated most, accounting for 53% and 22% of all the attitudinal resources respectively. Chengguan is evaluated most by the propriety attitude followed by the veracity attitude and the victims are evaluated most by the capacity attitude.3) Chengguan and the victims are evaluated by multiple appraisers. In appraising chengguan, the journalists employ the most attitudinal resources followed by the witnesses and the victims. In appraising the victims, the journalists employ the most followed by the witnesses and the victims’ family. chengguan’s employment of the attitudinal resources is the least in evaluating the victims and themselves.These salient attitudinal features construct the hybrid identities of chengguan. The dominating employment of the negative propriety attitude constructs chengguan’s identity as a bandit and that of the negative veracity attitude constructs chengguan as a liar. Meanwhile, the intensive employment of the negative capacity attitude constructs the victims as the weak. As the second most evaluated, the victims’ identity highlights chengguan’s identity. At last, this thesis explores the possible causes underlying the employment of these attitudinal resources in chengguan’s identity construction from the situational, societal and institutional contexts.The significance of this study is that it provides a new research perspective for the study of identity construction, offers insights to the practitioners in the news industry of how to express attitude with language in critical news reporting, and helps the public understand the nature of news reports and establish critical thinking.