Research On Attitude Resources In Doctor-patient Relationship News From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Halliday believes that language has three metafunctions,ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.Martin established Appraisal Theory which is precisely based on the further development of interpersonal function.Appraisal Theory is a lexical-based appraisal discourse analysis system,which concerns with negotiable attitudes,the intensity of the involved emotions,the source of appraisal respectively.By employing attitude system of appraisal theory,this article statistically and comparatively analyzes the distribution of attitude resources in doctor-patient relationship news reports from 2010 to 2016,explores whether the media's attitude towards doctor-patient relationship changes,and finally combines the language strata of Systemic Functional Linguistics to explain the findings of this study.This article is divided into four parts.The first part introduces the theoretical framework of attitude system of Appraisal Theory and language strata of Systemic Functional Linguistics.Appraisal Theory contains three subsystems: attitude,engagement and graduation.Attitude system includes three subsystems: affect,judgment and appreciation.In the second part,the overall statistical analysis of all kinds of affect,judgment and appreciation resources in doctor-patient relationship news reports found that the judgment attitude is of the highest frequency,accounting for 43.85%,followed by appreciation attitude,accounting for 31.97%,and affect attitude is at least,accounting for 24.20%.Since affect is directly related to people's emotions,news reports are used to a minimum in order to avoid the strong subjectivity and individuality.Judgment attitude is more objective than affect and therefore are used most in reports.In addition,statistics on the distribution of positive and negative resources in the corpus shows that positive resources accounted for 39.74% while negative resources accounted for 60.26%;secondly,A statistical analysis,which combined the appraisal object from positive and negative perspectives,of attitude,judgments and appreciation resources found that most of affect resources are describe patients' insecurity and distrust to doctor when they seek medical treatment in the hospital;the article use most of judgment negative resources to describe doctor's ability and reliability;most of negative composition resources ofappreciation are used to describe doctor-patient relationship,which reflect the stressful doctor-patient relationship and patients and doctors are on guard against each other.The third part firstly observes,from the longitudinal perspective,the proportion of attitude,judgments and appreciation resources of the total appraisal resources of doctor-patient relationship news reports over the years,and finds that doctor-patient relationship news reports gradually reduce the use of attitude resources and increase the use of judgment resources and appreciation resources.Secondly,compared with the proportions of positive and negative resources in attitude,judgments and appreciation resources,a line chart is drawn,finding that three line chart all have an upward tendency.That is,doctor-patient relationship news reports gradually increase the use of positive resources and reduce the use of negative resources.The fourth part interprets the research findings of this thesis by using the language strata of Systemic Functional Linguistics.Discourse semantics embodies situational contexts so that different appraisal resources reflect the media's different positioning of social relations between doctors and patients.The analysis of doctors,patients and doctor-patient relationships in the second and third parts is a reflection of social relations that occurred in the news.This study is of great significance both theoretically and practically.Theoretically speaking,this study once again proves the applicability of attitude subsystem of Appraisal Theory for discourse analysis of doctor-patient relationships news reports.From a practical point of view,the comparative analysis of doctor-patient relationship reports over the years can help us to observe the changes of attitudes of news media and also it can help people improve their ability to understand reports and identify the social situation that the reports reflect.