A Contrastive Discourse Analysis On The Application Of Appraisal Resources In Chinese And American US-China Trade War News Reports

Appraisal theory is put forward by Martin.It is the further development of interpersonal function—one of Halliday’s three metafunctions of systemic functional linguistics.Appraisal theory makes up for the limitation of interpersonal function,and proves that appraisal resources contain abundant interpersonal meaning.Since it was put forward,appraisal theory has attracted lots of attention.Besides,it has been applied into various fields,especially in linguistics.The study of appraisal resources in news reports draws more attention than other discourses.Since the outbreak of the US-China Trade War,it has attracted the attention of the whole world.Trade War not only concerns the future of China and the United States,but also has a great effect on the development of economy all over world.The reports of the Trade War are far more abundant,but at present,the researches on Trade War are confined to the political and economic studies.The linguistic researches on Trade War are only few.Therefore,this paper takes the reports about the US-China Trade War from China Daily and New York Times as the researching object.Based on appraisal theory combined with the perspective of critical discourse analysis,this paper makes a comparative study of appraisal resources in these news reports with the aid of UAM Corpus Tool 3.3,aiming to solve the following research questions:1.What are the differences in the distribution of appraisal resources in the news reportsof China Daily and New York Times?2.What are the ideology and social value hidden behind the appraisal resources in thenews reports of China Daily and New York Times respectively?3.How do China Daily and New York Times realize the ideology and social valuethrough appraisal resources?The study shows:(1)The proportion of attitude resources in China Daily is lower than that in New York Times,and engagement resources rates more in China Daily.The use of graduation resources is similar.(2)New York Times contains more personal views.Besides,there are two voices in it.One voice,on behalf of Trump’s administration,attempts to misguide the readers to believe China threat theory.The other voice disagrees Trump’s tariffpolicy and holds a positive attitude to the solution of the Trade War.Compared with New York Times,China Daily is more objective,choosing to respect and cooperate with the US instead of aggravating the dispute.(3)By using attitude resources,the news reporters invisibly mislead the readers with potential ideology.They employ abundant engagement resources so as to increase the objectivity of the news,meanwhile,make good use of heterogloss to convey hidden values.Graduation runs through the whole appraisal system,intensifying the language expression.The study is expected to enrich the research of appraisal theory,to test the application of the combination of appraisal theory,critical discourse analysis and corpus analysis.This study is also expected to help the readers develop into critical thinking.