| Journalistic discourse reflects social culture.With the progress of science and technology and the development of cultural media,people can know everything in the world without going out of their homes.Watching TV news or searching information on the Internet has already become a part of people's life.News media declare the objectivity and impartiality of its reports,which is not the case.Journalists often imply their stances and tendencies in their reports to influence the judgment of readers.Therefore,it is necessary for the readers to explore the language strategies of news discourse and further explore the reporter's intention of writing.The Appraisal Theory is a lexical grammar framework proposed by Martin and developed in the 1990 s.This theory is the enrichment and development of interpersonal meaning in Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics.Appraisal Theory focuses on the negotiation of various attitudes and the close relationship between language and values.Based on the semantic category,the evaluative resources are divided into three aspects: Attitude,Engagement,and Graduation.The engagement system is concerned with negotiation of interpersonal meaning or conceptual meaning in speech.The engagement resources mainly relate to monogloss and heterogloss.Speakers or writers can use the resources to alienate or associate with potential listeners or readers.This thesis selects 30 reports from the Guardian's official website as the research corpus,takes the Appraisal Theory as the theoretical foundation,and applies qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the engagement resources in news reports on Brexit.The quantitative method uses corpus statistics software UAM Corpus Tool to make statistical analysis of the news discourse and obtains the distribution of the engagement resources and the frequency of the occurrence of each resource.Qualitative method is used to analyze how engagement resources play a role in corpus,allowing for the establishment of negotiations between reporters and potential readers.The purpose of this study is to explore the distributive features of engagement resources in the selected news discourse,as well as the realization of the engagement resources in the Brexit news,and to reveal British ideology and power relations reflected in the engagement resources.The findings of the study can be summarized as the following three points: first,Brexit news reports are found to contain rich engagement resources,totaling 1068.Dialogic expansion accounts for much higher percentage(62.55%)than dialogic contraction(37.45%);second,the reporters of Brexit news carefully design and conceal ideology in the words and structures of news reports.It can be found that reporters prefer to use dialogic expansive resources,and more dialogic expansion resources,especially entertain resource is used to admit the possibility of the existence of other views,and claim the validity,objectivity and authority of the news reports to interact with and persuade potential readers;finally,engagement resources can reflect the ideologies and power relations.The engagement resources in the Guardian's news reports on Brexit reveal that the UK is not unanimous in this event,and the voice of opposition has always existed.The root of this is the contradiction between political parties and groups.The value and significance of this study mainly includes the following three aspects: first,it enriches the application of Appraisal Theory and the related researches on the Brexit news;secondly,it confirms the engagement system can be used not only for research on racial discrimination,hard news,sexual discrimination and other news reports,but also can be employed in seemingly neutral news discourse such as Brexit.Therefore,it expands the research scope of Appraisal Theory applied to news reports;finally,this study has a certain degree of significance on the teaching of English reading,helps to arouse learners' critical thinking and critical reading awareness and improve the insight into the news reports,and thus learners can have a better understanding of English news discourse. |
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