A Contrastive Analysis Of Interpersonal Meaning In The English Political News Discourse From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Linguistics

With the acceleration of globalization and the advent of information age,the role of political news is becoming increasingly remarkable in people's social life as politics has penetrated into almost every aspect of our life.However,previous linguistic studies mainly focus on political news reports from the perspectives of stylistic features,metaphor,translation,critical discourse analysis and interpersonal meaning.With respect to interpersonal meaning of political news reports,most researches are conducted on the basis of Halliday's model of interpersonal meaning or Martin's Appraisal theory.Little attention has been paid to the contrastive analysis of the interpersonal meaning of political news in different social-cultural contexts with the combination of them.In light of this research gap,this thesis adopts a systemic functional approach to make a contrastive analysis of the realization of interpersonal meaning in a corpus of 10 pieces of English political news reports selected from China Daily(CD hereafter)and The New York Times(NYT hereafter)from the perspectives of Mood system,Modality system,Attitude System,Engagement system and Graduation System with the combination of qualitative method and quantitative method.It aims to find out the similarities and differences in the realization of interpersonal meaning between the political news in different social-cultural contexts and reveals the reasons for the differences from the perspectives of culture and political system.Through a detailed contrastive analysis,this thesis draws the following conclusions.Firstly,in regard to Mood system,declaratives occupy the full length of the two different newspapers to provide political information for the readers,which is in conformity with the communicative aim of political news reports.Secondly,with respect to Modality system,modal operators expressing Probability enjoys the biggest proportion in the two newspapers.Within Mood Adjunct,Adjuncts of Polarity and Modality account for the largest proportion in the two newspapers.While Adjuncts of Mood enjoy a bigger proportion in NYT than those in CD.The reason lies in that China is a country with collectivism while America is a country with individualism.Comment Adjunct is rarely used in the two newspapers to increase the objectivity of the political news.Thirdly,with respect to Appraisal system,it is found that more Engagement resources are employed in CD than those in NYT,which is due to the different political systems between China and America.Also within Attitude system,Appreciation resources of positive meaning enjoy a bigger proportion in CD while Judgment resources with negative meaning are preferred in NYT,which is also related to different political systems.In addition,Chinese journalists tend to employ positive Attitude resources while both positive and negative Attitude resources are found in the English ones.This phenomenon can be explained by the fact that China is a country with collectivism that advocates group interests and harmony while America is a country with individualism that put emphasis on individual value and freedom.It is feasible and rewarding to make a contrastive analysis of English political news reports from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL hereafter).Hopefully,this research could provide some useful theoretical and practical implications for the writing and teaching of political news reports.