An Investigation Of Presidential Election News' Generic Features Based On Appraisal Theory

Presidential election news is a main discourse type of political news,which focuses on relevant political activities and concerned parties' political stances in the presidential campaign.Studies on this discourse type can reveal the generic features of presidential election news.The reasons of selecting presidential election news as the research object are twofold.The first reason is that presidential election news has great influence on electorates and political development tendency.The second reason is that presidential election news is an important research object in news discourse analyses,but current linguistic studies on this discourse type are not deep enough,since they mainly focus on the relationship between ideologies and language forms in some specific news discourses,as well as on some specific features of presidential election news.To complement this shortage,the present study investigated the appraisal resources in presidential election news,aiming to reveal the generic features of presidential election news.Twenty 2016 US presidential election news reports in The Washington Post are the research data for the present study.These data were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed in terms of the attitude resources,engagement resources and graduation resoxurces,revealing the generic features of presidential election news.The research questions are as follows:First,what types of appraisal resources are employed in the presidential election news?Second,what generic features of the presidential election news are revealed by the appraisal resources?The results are as follows:First,all types of appraisal resources are used in the presidential election news.Second,the generic features revealed by the appraisal resources include:objectivity,reliability,facticity,propaganda,slanted objectivity,argumentation,persuasion,criticism,negativity,predictability,resonance stimulation,unexpectedness and superlativeness.