On Approaches To Pathos

Crisis report is the focus of current discourse analysis,but few researches have been conducted from the perspective of pathos,one of Aristotle's three persuasive means.On March 7,2017,part of Thaad equipment was transported to South Korea,resulting in the tense atmosphere of Korean Peninsula.This thesis,via analyzing approaches to pathos in Thaad coverage,intends to uncover emotions and attitudes of four representative countries: South Korea,the US,China and the UK,and to justify the significance of pathos perspective in analyzing crisis news reports.Upon surveying the classic works from ancient Greece downwards,the thesis demonstrates that “emotional orientation” and “emotional actualisation” are two indispensable and interactive dimensions of pathos,and that their respective elements need to be refined in the contemporary context.To be specific,the first stage,influenced by Aristotle,is to identify the audience's original emotion and then orient it to the rhetor's desired one via intensifying,creating or transferring;the second stage is the actualization of the desired emotion through narrative,rhetorical figures and delivery which are developed mainly from the Roman triad.To test the feasibility of this newly-enriched pathos framework,the author selects from Joong Ang Daily(of South Korea),The Washington Post,The Guardian(of UK)and China Daily--one typical news report from each to analyze how pathos is achieved by means of these approaches.The findings reveal that narratives,figures(esp.parallelism,metonymy),punctuation(esp.quotation marks)and pictures(photo,map,video)are prominent in appealing to the expected emotions from the audience,and in conveying the newspapers' attitudes or tendencies.As has been analyzed,South Korea and the US both intend to win the readers' support and empathy towards themselves,the difference being that the former tends to arouse the audience' hostile attitude to North Korea and the latter aims todevelop the readers' doubts against China.In contrast,China Daily,by strengthening sympathy for South Korean local victims,creates negative emotions to American and South Korean governments,and their Thaad deployment.The UK,different from the three involved countries,appears rather detached,only mildly arousing a favourable emotion towards the US.This study,with a specific analysis of pathos in the four Thaad reports,proves that the two-stage pathos framework is applicable in rhetorical criticism of crisis news coverage(with the actualizing stage more salient),that the three justified approaches(narrative,figure,delivery)to emotional actualization are pervasive,and that their refined methods or sub-approaches,though not all of them have been applied,are indeed of interpretability.It is envisaged that this pathos system is feasible to various types of discourse analysis and rhetorical practice,so as to get further enriched and refined in the application.