A Contrastive Analysis Of Appraisal Resources In English And Chinese Political News Discourse

Mass media has become an essential way to obtain information in our daily life since our society stepped into information era.Political news,as a kind of mass medium,reflects and influences our social life greatly,becoming an indispensible part in our life.However,reporters' voice is subtly permeated into the so-called impartial political news reports by using different language resources.It guides public opinions,views and their ideology towards national political issues.Appraisal Theory is a further development of interpersonal function of Systemic Functional Grammar,which provides a new kind of lexical-grammar framework in the interpersonal meaning study.These theory includes three subsystems: Attitude,Graduation and Engagement.It focuses on the negotiation of different attitudes,the intensity of various feelings and resources of appreciation.AT aims to reveal how writers express their ideas and attitudes and how they negotiate the relationship with their readers by using language skills.In order to give a contrastive analysis based on the Appraisal Theory,the author collected 16 pieces(total 14423 words)of political news reports towards the Paris terrorist attacks: 8 Chinese news reports and 8 English news reports.Chinese news reports are mainly selected from three news papers on the Internet: Guang Ming Daily http://www.gmw.cn,Xinhua net http://www.xinhuanet.com and Global Times http://wap.huanqiu.com.And the other eight English political news reports are from both Britain and American famous newspapers on the Internet: the Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/uk/ and the New York Times http://www.thenytimes.com/us/.To make a comprehensive and contrastive understanding of these selected political news,the author further explores similarities and differences of appraisal resources in Chinese and English political news reports by using the qualitative and quantitative methods.Through contrastive analysis,not only Chinese political news reports but also English political news reports towards the Paris terrorist attacks employ a great number of appraisal resources to transfer reporters' ideas and opinions.As for thethree subsystems,there are also many similarities.Attitude and Engagement are employed more than Graduation,Judgment and Affect are more preferred than Appreciation.Both kinds of news reports employ more dialogical expand resources in their news reports.In addition,among dialogical expand resources,Acknowledge resources take the first place.The frequency of distance resources is lower and both kinds of news reports tend to use more disclaim than proclaim.More importantly,differences are also analyzed in detail in this thesis.In a word,English news reports employ more Appraisal resources in the process of presenting their attitudes.Chinese political news reports prefer to use more Engagement resources while English political news reports employ much more Attitude resources.Then English news reports tend to employ lots of affect,while Chinese news reports are more likely to use judgment resources.What' more,the percentage of dialogical expand in Chinese news is a little more than that of English news.In the end,as for graduation resources,the overall amount in English news is more than that of Chinese news.There are some implications of this thesis after applying the Appraisal Theory to the contrastive discourse analysis.From the practical perspective,this thesis is meaningful for political news teaching and learning in class,and it can improve students critical reading.From the theoretical perspective,this study hopes to entich the evaluation of discourse analysis.