An Analysis Of Attitude In News Discourse From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Although news reports usually claim to be objective in content,just in evaluation and neutral in point of view,many scholars doubted it and the subjectivity and implicit preference in news reports has attracted more and more attention.Taking news reports on US election 2016 as a case,the present study studied the subjectivity in news reports from both semantic(attitude resources and invoked attitude)and prosodic perspectives on the basis of Appraisal Theory.The thesis aims to explore the attitude in news reports towards Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.The material used was a self-built corpus of news reports on US election 2016 collected from LexisNexis and some American newspapers with two sub-corpora-Trump news reports corpus(TNC)and Hillary news reports corpus(HNC).Aided by UAM Corpus Tool and Antconc,manual annotation of semantic attitude resources was done.And statistics of frequencies of words expressing attitude as well as statistical analysis was made to investigate attitude towards two candidates in news reports qualitatively and quantitatively.In addition,comparative analysis of invoked attitude and attitudinal prosody in two sub-corpora was made.Finally this paper analyzed potential reasons for leading to the attitude differences towards two candidates.The major findings of the paper are:1)attitude resources in TNC were significantly more than those in HNC.The total frequencies of attitude resources in TNC were nearly twice that of HNC.2)Among three types of attitude resources,the frequencies of judgement were highest in TNC,followed by appreciation and affect.In HNC,the frequencies of judgement nearly equaled that of appreciation and the frequencies of affect were lowest.3)In terms of loading of attitude,there were significantly more negative attitudes expressed in TNC while there were significantly more positive attitudes expressed in HNC.4)There are also differences in distribution of attitude within each attitudinal category.Within affect,unhappiness and insecurity were much more expressed in TNC while happiness and inclination were much more expressed in HNC;within judgement there were significantly more negative meanings of propriety and capacity expressed in TNC while in HNC there were significantly more positive meanings of capacity and propriety.Within appreciation,there were more negative meanings of reaction and composition while in HNC;there were more positive meanings of reaction and composition.5)In terms of mode of attitude,both sub-corpora used significantly more inscribed attitudes than invoked attitudes.Afford was the most frequently used form of realization of invoked attitude in both sub-corpora and Provoke and Flag were relatively less used.And Provoke in HNC was used a little more than that in TNC.6)In terms of attitudinal prosody,intensifying prosody dominated in TNC,followed by saturating prosody and dominating prosody while saturating prosody dominated in HNC.Dominating prosody was rare in both sub-corpora.In terms of loading of prosody,negative prosody dominated in TNC while positive prosody dominated in HNC.The present studied the subjectivity and implicit preference in the news reports from the perspective of semantic and prosodic attitudes by exploring the attitude differences in news reports.In the meanwhile,the study provided a possibility of new perspective to a systemic research of attitude by means of a corpus-based approach.