An Analysis Of Chinese News Reports Of Medical Disputes From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

News reports are playing a more and more significant role in people's daily life. The important events and hot issues at home and abroad can be acquired from news reports. In recent years, all kinds of medical disputes have emerged one after another. And medical disputes have become one of the hot social issues nationwide and drawn people's great attentions.News discourse analysis has been an important field of linguistic research. The initial study of news reports was conducted from stylistic and socio-cultural perspectives(e.g. Crystal and Davy, 1969; Wang Zuoliang, 1987; Hou Weirui, 1988; etc). With the emergence of Discourse Analysis(DA), it opened a new research perspective for news discourse. In 1979, Roger Fowler first put forward “Critical Discourse Analysis”(CDA) in his book: Language and Control. Since then, many researchers(Fowler, 1991; Van Dijk, 1998; Xin Bin, 1998; etc.) began to conduct critical discourse analysis on news discourse. In the early 1960 s, Halliday(1985, 1994) put forward Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL) which provides a detailed and comprehensive theoretical framework for discourse analysis. SFL reveals that interpersonal function is realized via mood, modality and modal adverbials. However, as for how to convey the writer/reader's or speaker/listener's viewpoints through language expression, SFL has no complete system. In 2000, Martin found the defect and established the Appraisal theory(AT) which further developed SFL. Appraisal theory is the development of interpersonal meaning of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It consists of three subsystems, namely, attitude, engagement and graduation. Since its establishment, AT was applied by a lot of scholars both abroad and at home to analyze various discourses(e.g. Iedema, Feez and White, 1994; White, 1998; Korner, 2000; Coffin, 2002; Hood, 2004; Wang Zhenhua, 2004; Chen Xiaoyan, 2007; Liu Yueming, 2012; Bu Zhanting, 2013; etc.). However, Chinese news discourse is a rarely touched field.The present study is to analyze Chinese news discourse of medical disputes by the application of Appraisal theory. In this study, fifteen Chinese news reports of medical disputes are selected as analytical corpus by adoption of a stratified random sampling from some domestic newspapers from the year of 2012 to 2014. With the help of UAM Corpus Tool 3.2 and Excel 2007, both qualitative and quantitative approaches are involved in this study. The present study aims at exploring how “Attitude”, “Engagement” and “Graduation” resources are realized and distributed in Chinese news reports of medical disputes and discussing the reasons of the distribution.Through analysis, the major findings are as follows: Firstly, the analytical results suggest that fewer attitude resources are used in Chinese news reports of medical disputes, accounting for the lowest percent(4.9%). The three subcategories of attitude system: affect, judgment and appreciation, have very strong subjectivity. Thereby, it embodies the objectivity of Chinese news reports of medical disputes.Secondly, the analytical results suggest that the engagement resources are the most frequently used appraisal resources in Chinese news reports of medical disputes, accounting for 86.5%. As for the subcategory of heterogloss, news reporters use more contractive resources than expansive resources. In contractive resources, the news reporters tend to use disclaim resources to suppress the dialogic space of other resources so as to highlight the reliability of his/her viewpoints. Proclaim resources are used by news reporters to demonstrate the warrantability of their positions in order to set themselves against, suppress or rule out substitutable positions. In expansive resources, attribute resources are used more frequently than entertain resources. In attribute resources, acknowledge resources are used by news reporters to introduce other authoritative voices into news reports so as to make the news reports truer and more reliable. Through using entertain resources, the news reporters try to align with the readers which may hold other viewpoints so as to make news reports more acceptable by the readers.Finally, graduation resources account for 8.6% of appraisal resources in Chinese news reports of medical disputes. Through analysis, scalable force resources are more frequently used than ungraded focus. The news reporters use force resources to construe the value position of the reporters and maximize to make the readers accept his/ her opinion. The reporter applies rise or clear words to highlight its positive attitude, and uses falling or fuzzy words to weaken its negative attitude.The present study proves its feasibility in analyzing Chinese discourse from the perspective of AT, extends the research scope of Appraisal theory and provides a new insight for Chinese discourse research. The application of AT provides news reporters with appropriate evaluation strategies of news reports writing. And it is hoped that readers can interpret Chinese news reports of medical disputes correctly and unearth the true news information hidden behind viewpoints and attitudes of reporters from a critical reading perspective so as to improve their critical consciousness.This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction of the thesis, including the research background, the purpose and significance of research, and layout of the thesis. Chapter two is literature review. The author briefly reviews on the related studies of Appraisal theory at home and abroad and on the related studies of news reports. In Chapter three, the theoretical framework of this study is illustrated, covering three sub-systems of Appraisal theory and their subcategories respectively. In Chapter four, the research methodology is presented, including research questions, research instrument, data collection and analytical procedures. Chapter five is about results and discussion. The author uses the three subsystems of Appraisal Theory to analyze Chinese news reports of medical disputes and summarizes the distribution and the major features of appraisal resources of Chinese news reports of medical disputes. Chapter six is the conclusion which includes major findings, practical implications and the limitations of this study and suggestions for future study.