| Extreme weather is a rare meteorological event occurring in a certain region in a certain period of time,and its probability of occurrence is usually less than 5%or 10%.Extreme weather can be divided into extreme high temperature,extreme drought,and heavy rainfall and so on.A review of literature reveals that the study of attitude resources on extreme weather from the perspective of linguistics is rare.This thesis is a comparative study of attitude resources on Chinese extreme weather in China Daily and The Washington Post.In order to reveal the similarities and differences of attitude resources on Chinese extreme weather in Chinese and American news discourses,this paper selects four kinds of Chinese extreme weather news reports from April 1st,2011 to April 1 st,2017.The research questions are listed as follows:(1)what are the features and similarities of attitude resources on Chinese extreme weather in CD and WP?(2)Do the attitudes resources on Chinese extreme weather in CD and WP differ from each other?If they do,what are the differences?The analysis of data combines quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis.Firstly,two small scale corpus is established based on the selected Chinese extreme weather news discourses,namely the corpus of Chinese extreme weather in China daily and the corpus of Chinese extreme weather in The Washington Post.Then,attitude resources are identified in this corpus and the occurrence of each attitude resource is counted by UAM Corpus Tool 3.3.Finally,similarities and differences of attitude resources on Chinese extreme weather in Chinese and American news reports are analyzed with some specific examples.The major findings of the present study are listed as follows.(1)There exist three features of attitude resources on Chinese extreme weather in Chinese and American news discourses,which are also their similarities.Firstly,there are a large number of attitude resources on Chinese extreme weather in Chinese and American news discourses.377 attitude resources are employed in Chinese news discourses;445 attitude resources are used in American news discourses.Among the three subsystems of attitude system,judgement system which concentrates on the evaluation of people’s behaviors appears most frequently.Secondly,normality is employed most in Chinese and American news discourses.Normality is mainly related to how special someone or something is.Normality in Chinese news discourses aims at evaluating how unusual or normal the extremeweather is.It just states the facts of extreme weather.However,normality in American news discourses aims at evaluating how unusual or abnormal the extreme weather is.It lays stress on the negative aspects of Chinese extreme weather.Finally,composition in American and Chinese news discourses appears least and there are few examples.Composition is closely related to the order or balance of our view,which relates to our perception.More precisely speaking,composition appears only once in Chinese and American news discourses.Maybe it is because the chosen data in the present study,composition in American and Chinese news discourses is used least.(2)There are differences of the distribution of attitude resources on Chinese extreme weather in Chinese and American news discourses.Firstly,the major difference of Chinese extreme weather between Chinese news discourses and American news discourses exists in attitude-polarity.Positive attitudes in Chinese discourses are higher than negative ones,while there are more negative attitude resources than positive ones in American news discourses.Secondly,even though normality is employed most in Chinese and American news discourses,the attitudes towards Chinese extreme weather are completely different.Normality in Chinese news discourses aims at describing the facts of Chinese extreme weather.It states that some extreme weather appears more frequently in winter than other seasons and explains the reason why some extreme weather is common in winter.It pays more attention to how frequent and strong some extreme weather is in order to tell people what they should do.Normality in Chinese news discourses implies that the government and the public hold the positive attitude that it is possible to curb and improve Chinese extreme weather.On contrary to Chinese news discourses,normality in American news discourses focuses on the negative aspects of Chinese extreme weather.There are many negative words,such as "severe","hazardous" and"even-worse",which indicates that some extreme weather in China is beyond control and abnormal.It concentrates on how severe and dangerous the extreme weather in China is and how hazardous the effect of Chinese extreme weather is.Moreover,it overstates the severity of Chinese extreme weather and takes negative attitudes towards Chinese extreme weather and it burdens people with the severity of Chinese extreme weather.Finally,among the three subsystems of attitude resources,the distributions of affect and appreciation differ in Chinese and American news discourses.In Chinese news discourses,there are more appreciation resources than affect resources;while in American news discourses,there are more affect resources than appreciation resources.Affect involves positive and negative feeling,such as pleasure/pain,confidence/worry,and interest/boredom.Appreciation can be seen as institutionalized feelings.Specially speaking,appreciation is to evaluate whether things are perfect or good.In other words,affect involves emotions and it is the reaction to behaviors while appreciation is aesthetic and it is the evaluation of some phenomena.Consequently,it can be found that the evaluation of Chinese extreme weather in Chinese news discourses is more objective than that in American news discourses.The study indicates that positive attitudes in Chinese news discourses are higher than negative ones,while there are more negative attitude resources than positive ones in American news discourses.That is to say,American news discourses hold negative attitudes towards Chinese extreme weather.Moreover,our study not only broadens the applicatory scope of appraisal theory,but also helps people correctly understand the attitude resources in news discourses. |
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