| Technology news discourse is a kind of media discourse mainly to report the latest achievements and trends in the technology sector.As technologic strength can reflect comprehensive national strength,technology news can therefore be manipulated by reporters to show the ideologies of governments.Thanks to the pervasiveness of network,newspaper media around the world nowadays release massive amounts of news through official websites,so that readers can quickly reach the updated news at the first time.It's generally acknowledged that news reports are the objective and authentic descriptions of events,however,as a form of social practice,news discourses more or less contain the reporters' or the social groups' viewpoints and political stances.Halliday proposes the systemic functional grammar to investigate interpersonal meaning in discourse at the lexico-grammatical level.Later,Martin works together with his colleagues to examine interpersonal meaning at the semantic level and raises the appraisal theory.Appraisal theory marks the new breakthrough of systemic functional linguistics in interpersonal meaning,providing an analytical framework for evaluation.It concerns the sources of various attitudes that encounter in discourses and discusses how these attitudes negotiate with each other.Based on the appraisal theory,this study conducts a contrastive analysis to explore the distributions and frequencies of engagement resources in news reports of Chinese and American news media about Huawei's 5G technology.The collected 30 technology news reports are selected from the websites of China Daily and The New York Times.Among them,20 pieces are from China Daily,with a total of 8504 words;while the remaining 10 pieces are from The New York Times,with a total of 8509 words.UAM Corpus Tool is introduced into the study to facilitate the annotation work and the analysis process.Through the use of both quantitative and qualitative methods,the current study finds that engagement resources pervade both Chinese and American news discourses and there exist similarities and differences in the distribution and frequencies of engagement resources.Reports about Huawei's 5G technology from China Daily and The New York Times share similarities in the following four aspects:(1)Dialogic expansions are preferred than dialogic contractions;(2)Within the dialogic contraction type,disclaim resources outnumber proclaim resources significantly;(3)Within the subtype of entertain,both two news reports corpora see modality resources occupy the greatest proportion;(4)Within the subtype of attribute,acknowledge resources cover the dominant proportion of both two news reports corpora.Meanwhile,the current study also finds two major differences between the reports of Chinese and American media,which are(1)Within dialogic contraction type,China Daily news reporters incline to apply counter resources,while The New York Times news reporters tend to apply deny resources;(2)Within dialogic expansion type,China Daily news reporters incline to employ more attribute resources,while The New York Times news reporters tend to employ more entertain resources.This study applies the appraisal theory to the analysis of technology news discourses about Huawei 5G issued by the Chinese and American news media.By examining the distribution patterns of engagement resources that are dispersed in the 30 news texts and the way how these engagement resources realize the interpersonal meaning,the author hopes to figure out how news reporters make use of engagement resources to make their reports convincing and reliable,so as to reach the negotiable and interactive relationship with readers.This thesis also investigates the distribution differences of engagement resources and gives the explanation to help readers get better understanding of social ideologies.In addition,this thesis also would shed some lights on the interpretation of technology news,which will help readers to maintain critical thinking when reading news discourses. |
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