| Discourse analysis,as a pretty vital part of linguistics,has witnessed prosperous development in recent decades.The Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL),proposed by M.A.K.Halliday,provides discourse analysis with sound theoretical framework and thus be regarded as one of the most coveted methods in discourse analysis.According to SFL,there are three metafunctions of language which are ideational function,interpersonal function,and textual function.Appraisal theory,further developed from the interpersonal function,is a new lexical-syntactic framework and concerns with attitude,engagement and graduation resources in discourses.Appraisal theory extends the research on interpersonal system from sentential level to discursive level,from syntactic level to semantic level.Appraisal Theory(AT)is mainly employed in those researches analyzing news discourse,literature discourse,academic discourse,court-inquiry discourse,etc.For political news discourse,engagement resources and graduation resources are mainly concentrated by many scholars while few of them focus on attitude resources.A possible reason about this phenomenon,according to the author,lies in that political news are rather objective than other kinds of news and with few subjective views or attitudes compared with others.However,there is no political news reports which are absolutely objective for the simple reason that news editors have their own opinions which will be penetrated into news reports before they were published.To this point,the author deems that it is valuable to analyze the attitude resources in political news discourse,from which we can recognize the hidden ideology in political news discourse and humans' political standpoints.Eight pieces of political news reports are selected in this thesis randomly(two pieces from each)from four famous newspaper offices(New York Times,Washington Post,the Guardian and China Daily),all of these political news reports share the same topic(Abe's going to visit the Pearl Harbor).This research aims at analyzing and calculating all of the attitude resources in the eight news discourses.The results are concluded as follows: New York Times and Washington Post possess the largest number of appreciation resources(mainly focusing on positive appreciation resources),they are the number of 2.18% and 2.63% respectively,then the judgement resources(mainly focusing on positive social sanction evaluations)they are the number of 1.85% and 2.11% respectively,and the least one is affect resources,they are the number of 0.33% and 0.52% respectively.For the Guardian and China Daily,the number of their judgement resources is larger than that of appreciation resources,they are the number of 1.93% and 1.63% respectively.The percentages of affect resources in the eight news reports are the least in each of them.What's more,China Daily has the least number of appreciation resources in all the selected news discourse,it is the number of 1.23%.It is obvious that both of the two newspaper offices in America show positive attitude towards Abe's deed,while the Guardian and China Daily express neutral attitude about this issue.For percentages of the affect resources are the least in each of eight news reports,it can be inferred that political news discourse possess objective feature.Analyzing attitude resources in political news discourse can help people notice the political standpoints of related institutions or states and whether they deal with politic issues justly or not. |
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