| Disaster news reporting, as an important part of news reporting, is always the focus of journalistic activities and plays an indispensable role. Closely related to human life and born with high news value, disaster news reporting has aroused more and more public attention, becoming a research focus of the academic circles. However, the research on disaster news reporting is mostly conducted in the field of journalism; in the field of linguistics it has not been paid too much attention. In recent years, the study on disaster news reporting mainly concentrated from the perspectives of stylistics and critical linguistics in the field of linguistics. Therefore, this study chooses English news reports about the great aviation accident on March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Jet event as its material and makes a tentative study to explore the frequencies and different distributions of Engagement resources in Chinese and American English news reports from the perspective of Appraisal Theory, aiming at revealing the hidden ideology behind linguistic strategies. Appraisal Theory is the extension of interpersonal meaning of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It is a new framework, consisting of three subsystems: Attitude, Graduation and Engagement.The study selects fifteen pieces of English news reports about Malaysia Airline Jet event from China Daily and The New York Times respectively as two datasets. First, all the Engagement resources in these news reports are marked out and then with the help of linguistic analytical instrument--UAM Corpus Tool 2.8.14, a detailed contrastive analysis is made between the two datasets by using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, aiming to answer the three research questions as follows:(1) How are different engagement resources distributed in Chinese and American English disaster news reports respectively?(2) Are there any similarities or differences in the distribution of engagement resources between Chinese and American English disaster news reports? If yes, what are they?(3) What possible ideological implications or reasonable reasons are embedded in such linguistic strategies adopted in Chinese and American English disaster news reports respectively?The findings show that both tend to use more Expand than Contract. In Contract type, Disclaim is the most favorably applied, while Proclaim makes up a small proportion in both newspapers. In Expand type, the most used value is Acknowledge in both newspapers, and Entertain is used a lot, while Distance is used only a little. This shows they both prefer to open up the dialogic space and allow the existence of the alternative positions and basically conform to objectivity. However, In Expand system, The New York Times uses less Acknowledge values than China Daily. In Contract system, The New York Times uses more Deny values than China Daily. This shows the former prefers to interpolate the text with more subjective resources and reject the challenging voices in a directly negative way while the latter tends to be more objective than the former. After the thorough analyses, it is thought that they both belong to the same genre and have similar purposes. However, China and America have different cultural values, different mass media operating mechanisms and different stances towards the Malaysia Airlines Jet event. Therefore, they both have similarities and differences in their engaging strategies.By adopting Appraisal Theory as framework, the study makes a contrastive study of engagement resources in Chinese and American English disaster news discourses, hoping to provide a tentative approach to the research on disaster news discourse under Appraisal Theory and hoping to make some contribution to the research on cross-cultural discourse, especially news discourse. |
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