Discourse Analysis Of English Military News Based On The Appraisal Theory

The stylistic nature of news determines that the report should objectively reflect facts.However,the news journalists always intentionally or unconsciously infiltrate their opinions and positions into the news text.This phenomenon is relatively more common in the military news reports,which makes the discourse analysis of military news significant.In order to find out how journalists conceal their subjective positions behind the lines which are supposed to be objective,a discourse analysis is necessary.Among the theories of discourse analysis,Appraisal Theory provides a good theoretical framework to analyze the military news.The theory was proposed by James.R.Martin in the 1990 s,which developed from the interpersonal function within Systemic Functional Linguistics.It mainly discusses the realization of interpersonal meaning and studies the appraisal resources which can coordinate social relations.The Appraisal Theory proposes three sub-systems: attitude system,engagement system and graduation system,which provide a theoretical framework for discourse analysis at the semantic level.By now,the application of Appraisal Theory has been focused on the discourse analysis of speech,literature,advertisements,etc,which seldom concerns on the military news.Therefore,this thesis takes the military news of “THAAD Incident” as corpus to conduct a discourse analysis from the perspective of Appraisal Theory and discusses how the military news are constructed by the appraisal resources.Since 2016,the “THAAD Incident” has attracted great attention in Asia because of the protest in South Korean and the missile experiments in North Korean which happened after the announcement of the deployment of THAAD.The incident has brought about a large number of military reports in the mainstream media of Asian and Western countries.Based on this,the study selects 30 military news relevant to “THAAD Incident” from the Washington Post according to the degree of relevance and the time of news release.This thesis aims to discuss how appraisal resources align and strengthen the relationship between readers and news reporters from the two aspects:1)What is the distribution of the appraisal resources in military news?2)What are the characteristics of the three types of appraisal resources in military news?Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus,this study draws several conclusions as follows:1)The engagement resources occur more frequently than the attitude resources and graduation resources,which means the news reporters tend to open up the dialogic space in military news to keep the expressions in news superficial neutral.2)The characteristics of the three types of appraisal resources are as follows: In the attitude system,the attitude resources towards a certain person are less than the resources concerning on the events,which makes the reporters' subjectivity more veiled.In the engagement system,large amount of resources of dialogic expansion are used to reach the alignment with readers.In the graduation system,force resources maximize the journalists' attitude and position,which make it easier to infiltrate their stances into readers.The thesis expects to help the readers understand how the appraisal resources construct the news texts and enhance their sensitivity to the positions of journalists when reading military news.