The Analysis Of The Coverage Of Tibet Issues By The New York Times From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The Appraisal Theory is regarded as a new branch of linguistics and it derives from the Systemic Functional Grammar which pays attention to the interpersonal functions of the discourses.White(2001)holds the view that the Appraisal Theory can be adopted to conduct some researches,descriptions and explanations on how the speakers or writers utilize the language to express their attitudes,get involved in propositions and grade the assessment of meanings.The Appraisal Theory possesses three sub-categories: attitude,engagement,and gradual.With the development of the Appraisal Theory,a growing number of scholars both at home and abroad conduct researches on the engagement resources in various kinds of discourses.However,the employment of the Appraisal Theory to analyze the engagement resources in the political news discourses is still not enough.Therefore,this thesis endeavors to conduct an analysis on the English political news discourses from the Appraisal Theory and all of the nine pieces of political news are selected from the New York Times(http://www.nytimes.com).In this thesis,three questions will be answered:(1)How are these engagement resources distributed in the political news discourses?(2)What are the functions of these engagement resources in the political news discourses?(3)Why are these engagement resources adopted in these political news discourses? In order to answer these three research questions,qualitative analysis method will be employed in this thesis to analyze the distribution of the engagement resources and explain the functions of each engagement resource in the nine pieces of political newsAfter making an analysis on nine pieces of political news discourses by employing the UAM Corpus Tool,the researcher finds that the resources of expand(59.72%)outnumber the resources of contract(40.28%).Among the dialogic contract resources,the employment of thedisclaim resources makes up 75.86%.In terms of the disclaim resources,deny resource(77.27%)occupies more than the counter resource.Among the dialogic expansion resources,the attribute resources(66.67%)occupy more than the entertain resources(33.33%).The reason why the numbers of the expand resources are adopted more than the contract resources is that the features of the expand resources are compatible with the features of the political news.The reason why these engagement resources are employed in the selected political news is that the New York Times holds different ideologies.It is of great importance and necessity to conduct an analysis on engagement resources of the political news discourses through using the Appraisal Theory for the reason that it can help the readers to have a better understanding of this theory and the political news,and it also plays a crucial role in the language cultivation.The analysis of the political news discourses by using the Appraisal Theory can give some sparkling ideas to those scholars who are interested in the political news and discourse analysis.