A Comparative Study On Appraisal Resources In Cultural Soft News Between People’s Daily And News Week

Reading news is one of the most important ways for people to obtain new information in modern society.Although news has long touted itself as "objective,impartial and neutral",it is increasingly being questioned.Influenced by various factors such as different social and cultural backgrounds,political appeals,economic situations and personal needs,journalists would put their own personal or even national attitudes more or less in the content they write.As the expansion of interpersonal function under Systemic Functional Linguistics,Appraisal System is a lexical-grammatical framework that expresses speakers’ /writers’ feelings and interpersonal or social relations,consisting of three sub-systems: Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.Attitude system is the core and basic part of Appraisal Theory,which involves the judgment of people’s emotion and behavior and the evaluation of things..Engagement system is the way that evaluators participate in the discourse so as to modulate their responsability about their speaking.Graduation system has to do with grading all appraisal resources,regulating attitudes and the degree of engagement.Since its establishment,Appraisal Theory has been constantly modified by scholars and applied to different text analyses,among which the analysis of news discourse is quite common.However,few scholars have done researches on soft news from the perspective of Apprisal Theory.Therefore,the author intends to conduct a study on 30 pieces of English and Chinese cultural soft news selected from News Week.Com and People’s Daily Online.,which formed two sub-corpora.There are three research questions in this study :（1）How are the appraisal resources distributed in the English and Chinese cultural soft news?（2）Are there similarities and differences between the two sub-corpora?（3）What are the possible reasons for their typical evaluative features in the soft news? To conduct the study,the thesis adopts both quantitative and qualitative analyses.Quantitative method is employed to calculate the use of appraisal resources with the help of UAM Corpus Tool.Based on the statistics,the author makes a comparative analysis,finds out the similarities and differences and then further explores the reasons for their typical evaluative features.The results show that there are significant similarities and differences between English and Chinese cultural soft news in the distribution of appraisal resources.The differences can be attributed to the thinking modes and cultural identities of journalists as well as their language characteristics,while the similarities result from the characteristics of soft news and the objective principle of news reports.On the whole,through a comparative analysis of English and Chinese cultural soft news,this study will shed more light on soft news study,showing the rationality of applying Appraisal Theory to discourse analysis and broadening the scope of its application.