Appraisal Analysis On Business News About China From American Mainstream Newspapers

Business news,as a branch of news,is a time-limited and influential information resource.Business news not only conveys economic information but also presents the future world economic trends.Especially with the globalization of economy and the quick development of technology,the increasing international business communications highlight the importance of correctly understanding business news.Since appraisal resources applied in business news affect the comprehensiveness and profundity of readers' comprehension,this thesis employs Martin's appraisal theory to study the distribution features in business news about China from American mainstream newspapers.The author aims to reveal how business news writers apply discourse resources to express their attitudes,achieve the interpersonal communication and align/disalign readers.The 90 pieces of business news in the corpus are chosen from four American mainstream newspapers,Wall Street Journal,New York Times,Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.The author uses UAM CorpusTool 3.3 to do quantitative analysis for the corpus with about 50,000 words,and chooses some significant examples to do qualitative analysis.Three findings in this thesis reveal that: the use of engagement resource is the most,attitude resource the second and graduation resource the least in 90 pieces of business news.The subsystems of these resources are also distributed differently in the 90 pieces of business news: Firstly,in attitude resources,appreciation resources outperform affect and judgment resources;in engagement resources,dialogic expansion is the major part and the dialogic contraction is the minor one;in graduation resources,force resources are more than focus resources.Secondly,as for aligning readers and achieving interpersonal meaning,business news writers apply attitude resources to express attitude,appraise one's character and behavior and assess the value of things.In this way,they influence reader's attitude and viewpoint and align readers who hold the same opinion with them.Engagement resources are used by business news writers to affirm or disaffirm various different views that business news writers' voices involve or challenge,and thereby business news writers win interpersonal space for their stances.Graduation resources are used to grade the business news writers' interpersonal impressions,voice volume and semantic type.Based on this,business news writers strengthen or weaken the intensity of their voice and achieve the interpersonal meaning with readers.Lastly,business news writers use appraisal resources to influence readers' social stances and ideologies.The thesis studies and analyzes business news about China from American mainstream newspapers.The author sincerely hopes that the thesis may help the people who are engaged in international business activities and news readers to interpret the business news thoroughly,and offer some references for business news writers and researchers.