| Recently, the rapid development of computer and Internet technology has triggered off the prevalent phenomenon that more and more newspapers are informing the public through Internet media, making people know the latest news in a convenient and rapid way. Economic reportage plays an important role in our daily lives, involving the latest economic policies, business affairs and socioeconomic phenomena. The writers often express their own subjective evaluation and value position in the business affairs or propositions. Therefore, the interpersonal meaning can be conveyed in the economic news discourse, construing different interactions and negotiations among the various beliefs and stances.Appraisal theory was developed from the general theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. For discourse analysis, this thesis relies on appraisal theory provided by J. R. Martin and his colleagues, which is a sympathetic framework for dealing with interpersonal meaning. Appraisal theory provides ways for the researchers to express their opinions, get involved in propositions, and adjust the degree of the evaluation. Appraisal theory is divided into three interacting regions:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Each domain can be regionalized as subsystems. Considering that only a few researchers study the economic news from the perspective of engagement resources, this thesis is only concerned with engagement which gives a descriptive and explanatory account of the discourse strategies in the news discourse.To explore how the writers express the value positions by the engagement resources and indicate the interpersonal meaning, this thesis analyzed 15 Chinese economic news stories and 15 English ones downloaded repectively from the websites of http://www.people.com.cn/ and http://www.nytimes.com/. In this study,UAM CorpusTool is employed to analyze and compare the different distribution of engagement resources with qualitative and quantitative methods to find their similarities and differences.The similarities of the distribution pattern of Engagement resources in English and Chinese economic news are as follows: 1) Dialogical expansion is larger than dialogical contraction both in English and Chinese economic news discourse. 2)Within dialogical contraction, disclaim resources are both excessively used both in English and Chinese economic news discourse. 3) Within the subcategory of proclaim,the most preferred resource is endorse. 4) As for the subcategory of attribute,acknowledge resource takes the most part.Meanwhile, there exist many different distribution patterns of Engagement recourses in English and Chinese economic news, the differences are as follows: 1)With Dialogic Contraction, the disclaim and its subcategory deny resources are much larger in English economic news discourse, while counter is preferred by Chinese economic news discourse. 2) Within Dialogic Expansion, the entertain and distance resources are much larger in English economic news discourse, while acknowledge is preferred by Chinese economic news discourseThis thesis attempts to explore how the news writers express their own value positions with what kind of engagement resources which the writer engages and negotiates with the readers, through analyzing the distribution and frequencies of engagement resources. Moreover, this thesis illustrates that the reporter can be more objective and convincing by way of employing more dialogical expansion than contraction in the news discourse. In this thesis, appraisal is enacted to analyze and compare the different distribution of engagement resources between Chinese and English economic news. This thesis hopes to deepen our understanding of engagement resources in economic news and make appraisal theory accessible in more applications. |
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