| Language is used to convey ideas and send information.It can also be used to express certain feelings,opinions,attitudes.Due to the significance of evaluation in communication,scholars have attempted hard to study it from different perspectives by using different methods.The Appraisal Theory has seized the attention from scholars.It is developed from the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and has been widely adopted to analyze a number of kinds of mass media genres in recent years.Attitude system,engagement system,and graduation system are the three subsystems which consist of the appraisal system.Appraisal Theory is not only strong in systematicness,but also provides a reasonable and comprehensive basis for researching the types of appraisal resources in discourses.In addition,easy to be used is another feature for Appraisal Theory.That is to say,this theory can be applied directly to analyze texts by researchers.On the basis of framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Appraisal Theory,this study intends to conduct an evaluation analysis of 60 political news reports published by two English newspapers(The Guardian and China Daily),intending to figure out the evaluative features of this genre at lexical levels.Meanwhile,the establishment of a basic model of evaluation analysis for future study is also needed.Appraisal Theory,also can be called Appraisal System,which firstly showed up in the 1990s,was put forward by J.R.Martin and his colleagues.It is a new progress of the Systemic Functional Linguistics.Attitude,Engagement and Graduation mainly make up the Appraisal Theory.Attitude system is the crucial one in this theory.Atitudinal system is made up of three subsystems,namely,Affect,Judgment and Appreciation.On the basis of the theoretical model of Appraisal Theory,this study picks out 60 pieces of English political news reports in 2017 from The Guardian and China Daily,52890 words in total.The author tries to find some semantic attitudinal features of these pieces of reports.The methodology used in this study is a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.In detail,qualitative research method is adopted to recognize and identify evaluative sources,like English words expressing likes/dislikes,desire,pleasant/unpleasant feelings(J.R.Martin&P/R.R.White,2005),detailed positive and negative words in attitude system(J.R.Martin&P/R.R.White,2005).Quantitative research mainly relies on three subsystems of Attitude and their frequencies are calculated by the program UAM Corpus Tool 3.3.From the perspective of the type of Attitude,findings show judgment resources are the most frequently adopted,while the affect ones are the least.From the perspective of the mode of Attitude,most of the attitudes in the English political news reports are expressed in an inscribed means.As for the loading of Attitude,the positive attitudes make up nearly two times more than the negative ones.From the respective of the differences of attitudinal resources between Chinese(Chinese here is not infer to Chinese political news,but the news written by Chinese reporters in English)and English political discourses mainly exist in security or insecurity and tenacity resources,which reveals that different cultural background and national conditions may have impact on the usage of attitudinal resources.Except those two subcategories,the other subcategories are nearly similar.Findings of detailed investigation of the realization and distribution of the attitudinal resources of the three subsystems of Attitude are as follows.As for the subsystems of Affect,dis/satisfaction takes up the largest portion,while un/happiness takes up the least portion,and in/security is between the two.From the perspective of the mode of Affect,inscribed means are mainly revealed by affect meanings.From the perspective the loading of Affect the negative resources are even more than the positive ones.In the subsystems of Appreciation,the reaction resources play an important part in realizing appreciation resources.Composition resources are the least one to realize,valuation resources are between the two.All kinds of Appreciation resources are mainly adopted to convey the positive and explicit meaning.Within the subsystems of Judgment,all the five kinds of judgment resources employ an inscribed method.The capacity resources in social esteem are mostly adopted by the news reporters,while the propriety resources in social sanction are frequently employed,compared with the veracity resources.There are three main goals to conduct this study.Firstly,the author hopes to provide a comprehensive research basis which can help researchers to conduct further study.Secondly,this study hopes deepen the understanding of the semantic features of Attitude in English political news reports.Besides,some new tains of thoughts are supposed to be applied into future political news analysis.This thesis turns out that Appraisal Theory is very useful in analyzing the appraisal features of all kinds of genres,like previous researches have mentioned.Also,the findings in this research can be used for reference for future studies. |
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