| Disaster news report,as one domain of news reports,has a close relation to human life.Disasters have a wide range of impacts on human life.With the development of social networks,when disasters happen,people will get to know the situation through various medias.Disaster news report directly affects people’s cognition of disaster events.Disaster news report plays a certain role in spreading disaster events and stabilizing public emotions.If the disaster event is not properly reported,it will lead to rumors,cause public panic and affect the normal social life.Super typhoon "Lekima" landed in East China in August 2019.It hit more than10 provinces(cities)and caused huge loss of life and property.Relevant reports were released at the first time.Appraisal Theory was put forward by Martin and white(2000).Developed from the Interpersonal Meaning of Systemic Functional Linguistics,Appraisal Theory studies the interpersonal meaning in lexical level.Positive Discourse Analysis was proposed in 1999 By Martin.It focuses on the disadvantaged members of the society and advocates to solve social problems from the perspective of "construction" with a positive and friendly attitude so as to build a harmonious society.This paper adopts Appraisal Theory as the analytical framework,with Positive Discourse Analysis as data analysis technique,aiming to study the distribution of appraisal resources in typhoon Lekima news discourse,interpret its distributive characteristics and the construction of the positive significance.There are two research questions:(1)What appraisal resources are employed in Typhoon Lekima news reports from China daily? What is the distribution of these appraisal resources?(2)How these appraisal resources are employed to construe positive meaning in the news reports?In order to answer the above questions,this study selects 43 news reports about typhoon Lekima from the English edition of China Daily.Making a combination of the qualitative and quantitative methods,the study gets the following results:(1)All of the three appraisal resources can be found in the news reports of typhoon Lekima.The appraisal resources in news reports of typhoon Lekima are abundant,making a total occurrence of 1305 pieces;Attitude resource accounts for the highest proportion of appraisal resources,covering 43%,followed by Graduation resource(33%),and Engagement resource(24%).The positive resources are more selected than the negative ones;(2)Attitude resources are mainly realized via Appreciation andJudgement systems,aiming to reflect the serious consequences caused by typhoon Lekima and the timely and effective relief work done by the government,thus to build a capable and trustworthy government image;The Engagement resource is mainly realized through Dialogic Expansion,aiming to introduce different voices from all walks of life,reflecting the government’s active response to the relief work and its care for the victims and also giving confidence to the public to overcome the hardships together;The Graduation resource is mainly achieved via Force,most of them are used to modify the resources in the Appreciation system,in order to present an objective and truthful report of the disaster events.This study explores various appraisal resources in typhoon Lekima news report and interprets its positive meaning.It widens the research scope of Appraisal Theory and Positive Discourse Analysis,enriches the studies of disaster news discourse.Besides,it provides reference for the journalists to utilize tactic to spread disaster events,stabilize public mood,promote disaster relief work and present a good government image.It also provides suggestions for the government to better carry out disaster relief work. |
PDF Full Text Request