| Current political news,as a significant information source for people to know the international situation,represents the political stand and opinions of the leadership to some extent and has a guiding effect on readers’ ideological tendency and public opinion.Because language is closely connected with politics and international relations,news discourse,as one of the hotspots in discourse analysis research field,is not only the target of journalism research,but also has attracted extensive attention from the linguistic scholars.At present,the researches on news discourse are mainly studied from the perspectives of Systemic-Functional Linguistics,cognitive semantics,stylistic analysis,Appraisal Theory or discourse analysis,but few studies are based on the combination of the Appraisal Theory and the Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA).The crisis in Syria is so complicated for the reason that many interested parties are involved in the conflict.Among th e involved interested parties,the U.S.and Russia are the most two main representatives.As an intruder,the U.S.interferes in the civil war in Syria.However,Russia is seeking for a peaceful resolution for the Syrian.And China always stands on the side of Russia,Therefore,it is obvious that political news reports on the crisis in Syria are different in the U.S.and China.This thesis selects political news reports on the Syria crisis from the Chinese mainstream media-China,Daily’s official website(30 pieces)and the Los Angeles Times(30 pieces)from July 2011 to December 2018 as the research corpus.This thesis applied Martin’s Appraisal Theory-attitude system and its subsystems,affect,judgment and appreciation as the theoretical framework with a critical perspective,and combined methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis to study their characteristics and to explore how to interpret and analyze the news discourse objectively.This thesis aims to reveal the relationship between power and ideology in current political news discourse,and discuss its reasons based on the attitudinal resources.It also analyzes how the attitudinal resources are reflected in current political news discourse,and studies the significance of the attitudinal resources reflected in news discourse from the perspective of CDA;to analyze the relationship among these attitudinal resources and the ideology and the influence of the language used in political news discourse.Based on the similarities and differences between Chinese and American political news reports,this thesis explores the measures that news writers used to realize the interpersonal function and communication among readers of political news discourse in attitudinal resources.The study finds that in the news reporting of the Syria c.risis,the highest portion of attitudinal resources is appreciation in CD,which indicates that China holds a more objective standpoint of the crisis.However,judgment takes up the highest portion of attitudinal resourc.es in the Syria crisis news discourses from the LAT,which indicates that the U.S.holds a leading role and strongly keeps its power in Syria.CD uses a lot of adjectives,or nouns by adding suffixes to reflect its position from the level of appreciation,while uses verbs or verb phrases to express their attitudes from a judgmental level.There are similarities between macro and micro levels,but there are also some different tendencies in some aspects,which is by no means completely objective and neutral to report events.In fact,this research guides readers to view the international situation rationally from a critical perspective and learn to trace the essential connections through superficial phenomena.This study is an extension of the research on CDA and has some referential significance for further researches in this field. |
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