Engagement Resourses Under Appraisal Theory In Official Statement Of Crisis

The Appraisal Theory is the new explanation and development of the interpersonal meaning based on the Systemic Functional Grammar, which includes three systems, namely, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. The Engagement resources reflect the speaker’s or the writer’s stance and attitude toward an event or issue. With the Engagement resources, the interaction between the writer and the putative readers can be constructed.The present paper aims to investigate the Engagement resources distributed in statements delivered by the Malaysia Airlines, which explores the features of Engagement resources distributed in the corpus data and to find out how the speaker negotiates with the putative readers with Engagement resources. All the corpus data are randomly selected from the official website of Malaysia Airlines. In this study, both quantitative method and qualitative method are employed. The quantitative method is applied to analyze the frequencies of the Engagement resources distributed in the data, and the qualitative method is mainly employed to discuss how the interaction is constructed between the speakers and the putative readers by means of Engagement resources.The results indicate that the Malaysia Officials express their stance and attitude with the Engagement resources. The official statement is authoritative because the officials have the responsibility to release the latest and reliable news about the event. However, on the other hand, the officials may refuse or conceal the truth by using the Engagement resources for considering and balancing the interest with all parties. Therefore, the official statements become dialogic with the use of Engagement resources. Actually, British and American media are not satisfied with the Malaysia Officials for their secretive manners about the information. They try to unveil the lasted information to public and to force the Malaysia Officials to publicize more information about the event, and this can be a typical example for dialogism of discourse.