| As an indispensable form of news in our daily life,Entertainment News has attracted tens of thousands of readers with its relaxing and pleasant reporting style and timely and vivid reports.It has also drawn increasing attention from scholars both at home and abroad.Previous studies have been made mostly from two angles,namely,linguistic angle and non linguistic angle.These studies have deepened our understanding of Entertainment News in certain ways.Hallidy's Systemic Functional Grammar holds that language use is to achieve certain functions.Among them,the interpersonal function of language symbolizes expressions of all social relations,and reflects the relationship between people.The focus of Appraisal Theory is interpersonal meaning.It is a new theory developed from the study of interpersonal meaning by Systemic Functional Linguistics.It can be divided into three subsystems:attitude,graduation and engagement.Among them,the engagement resources can provide the means for the writers/speakers to position their own voices in the current communicative contexts to interact with other propositions or alternative voices,so as to align with their readers/listeners and achieve the purpose of harmonious interpersonal communication.Engagement system can provide a new perspective and a relatively complete theoretical framework for the analysis and discussion of the engagement resources and their interpersonal function in English Entertainment News.In the present thesis,we collect 36 pieces of English Entertainment News from the American magazine-Entertainment Weekly as a small corpus and use quantitative and qualitative research methods to analyze them with the employment of the UAM Corpus Tool.Under the framework of the engagement system of Appraisal Theory,this thesis is aimed at answering two questions:(1)What distribution features can be seen in different engagement resources in the corpus of the English Entertainment News from the American magazine Entertainment Weekly?What are their motivations?(2)How do English Entertainment News realize interpersonal function by the uses of various engagement resources?Research findings:First,engagement resources have widely existed in English Entertainment News discourse.Of the two sub-types of engagement resources,news reporters tend to use less Dialogic Expansion resources(40.50%)than Dialogic Contraction resources(59.50%).They are more likely to achieve alignment with their readers by enhancing authorial voices.Within Dialogic Contraction,the employment of Disclaim resources is larger than that of Proclaim resources.And Counter resources are the most frequently employed resources by the reporters.The use of the counter-expectancy strategy can arouse unexpected feelings from readers and increase the fun of Entertainment News.Within Dialogic Expansion,the Entertain resources enjoy more employment than the Attribute resources.And Distance resources are the least employed resources by the reporters.The possible motivations of these distribution features are different intersubjective emphases,grammatical features,context genre and report attitude.Second,English Entertainment News achieves the interpersonal function of alignment with the putative readers mainly through the uses of Dialogic Contraction resources and Dialogic Expansion resources.Dialogic Contraction resources can be used to enhance the authorial voice;Dialogic Expansion resources can be used to maintain a harmonious atmosphere.Through the uses of these engagement resources,the reporters interact and negotiate with their readers to achieve interpersonal function.The present research has some theoretical and practical significance.On the one hand,the deep analysis of the engagement resources in English Entertainment News can help to expand the research field of engagement system and also to enrich its application.On the other hand,this study helps to deepen readers' understanding of English Entertainment News reports,and also has some reference significance for Entertainment News report writing. |
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