The Research Of Attitudinal Resources In American News Reports About South China Sea Arbitration

News discourses have been one of the research hotspots in the field of discourse research.Although it is always emphasized that news is objective and impartial,there is no absolute objectivity in the news.As news is influenced by many factors,such as society,culture and politics,it always bears the subjective intentions held by the reporters.Appraisal Theory contains three sub-systems,including affect,engagement and graduation and they are employed to reveal appraisers' subjective attitude from different perspectives.The theory is used to reveal the reporters' attitudes,emotions and values towards the things that are reported.Based on the Appraisal Theory,the study aims to reveal the relation between languages and ideologies by analyzing the news about the arbitration reported by America media.On July 2016,the arbitral tribunal asked by the Philippines unilaterally made a so-called ruling.The whole thing attracts worldwide attention,and there are series of news reports by America media.Totally thirty samples about the South China Sea Arbitration selected from the Washington Post,with time ranging from January 2016 to June 2017,are employed as the objects of the present study.The attitude system within Appraisal Theory is taken as the theoretical framework.The study is conducted by means of qualitative and quantitative study.Firstly,the realizations of all attitudinal resources in selected news are explored from the lexical,syntactic,semantic and rhetorical perspectives.Then,with the help of UAM corpus tool,the distributive features of attitudinal resources,including the polarity and explicitness/implicitness,are explained in detail.Finally,based on the quantitative and qualitative study,the ideologies reflected from these attitudinal resources are explored further.Based on the statistics analysis,here come to some findings: Firstly,there are abundant attitudinal resources,and all the three sub-systems are employed in selected news.The attitudinal resources can not only be realized by explicit words,but also can be realized implicitly on syntactic,semantic and rhetorical levels.As for the affect,judgment and appreciation,the distribution of them is not very even.The judgment occupies the largest proportion,among which the im/propriety is used most frequently.Then it is the appreciation,in which the valuation occupies the largest proportion.Affect is least frequently used in selected news as it bears much more subjectivity.As for the polarity,the negative resources are more than the positive ones in selected news.The explicit resources are used more often than the implicit ones.In American News,by employing attitudinal resources,the United States shows its positive attitude towards the arbitration and Philippine.Besides,by employing these attitudinal resources,the United States distorts the image of China,and the United States intends to construct a negative image of China,in which China is unreasonable.The media always have so much relation with government,and the news reported by media manifests the values and ideologies of its own country all the time.Therefore,when readers are reading and analyzing the news,it is with great importance to improve critical thinking ability so that the readers can understand the ideologies hidden in the news.