A Contrastive Analysis Of Engagement Resources In Economic Editorials Of Chinese And American Newspapers

Engagement system is one of the three sub-systems in appraisal theory which was first proposed by Martin. It focuses on those language resources which can evoke the dialogue and negotiation of different opinions and stances. In recent years,engagement system was used to analyze different types of discourses, most of which were news reports and speeches.As an important form of news comment, editorial is considered as the core of the newspaper and represents the newspaper’s attitude and standpoint for major issues.Since it is an expression of the opinions of an editor, abundant engagement resources must be included. But previous studies based on linguistics mainly focused on the generic structure, interpersonal metaphor, mood, modality and attitude of editorials.Researches on editorials on the basis of engagement system are very few, let alone the comparative study between Chinese and English editorials. As to the research content,previous studies based on engagement system mainly focused on the usage of different engagement resources in discourses and the specific realization means of different engagement strategies were not involved. Besides, previous studies on editorials mostly took political ones as corpus and economic ones have been ignored all the time. Therefore, on the basis of engagement system, this paper made a contrastive analysis of engagement resources and the specific realization means of different engagement strategies in economic editorials of Chinese and American newspapers.17 and 11 economic editorials respectively published in famous American and Chinese newspapers are collected as corpus. All these editorials are about Chinese stock market from May to September in 2015. By means of quantitative analysis, this study analyzes the engagement strategy and specific realization means in economic editorials of Chinese and American newspapers.The study finds that there are some similarities and differences between economic editorials of Chinese and American newspapers in the use of engagement strategy. For the engagement strategy in them, the similarities are as follows. No matter economic editorials of Chinese or American newspapers, dialogic contract resources account for a higher proportion than expand resources. And within dialogic contract type, disclaim resources are much more than proclaim ones while within dialogic expand type, entertain resources account for the majority. The differences are:first, the proportion of dialogic contract resources in economic editorials of Chinese newspapers is larger than in American newspapers. Second, within dialogic contract type, proclaim resources occupy a larger proportion in economic editorials of Chinese newspapers than American newspapers. Third, within disclaim type, Chinese economic editorials tend to use a higher proportion of deny resources than counter while economic editorials of American newspapers apply the almost same proportion of them. As to the realization means, engagement strategy of both economic editorials in Chinese and American newspapers is all realized by some specific formulations and the formulations are corresponding as a whole. And within entertain type, modals are the main realization means and authors are more inclined to use implicit subjective expressions. The difference lies in that economic editorials of American newspapers prefer to use low value modals while Chinese economic editorials prefer high value modals. The reasons for the differences can be explained from three aspects:differences in values, roles of editorials and focuses.This study not only offers a new perspective of discourse analysis based on functional linguistics but also provides references for Chinese writers in English writing by the use of engagement resources. Also, the study helps readers to understand the deep meaning of engagement strategy applied by authors and improvetheir critical reading ability.