| As a specific discourse genre, media discourse fulfils the function of social practice and reveals unique and stable linguistic features. Such a discourse genre can be further divided into two subgenres:News Report and News Comment, with countless concrete texts focusing on politics, economics, society, science and the other topics. In this way, the genre, subgenre and the individual discourses form a topology in the field of Discourse Analysis. The purpose of discourse analysis on news media is to discover the social structure reflected by the discourse, the interpersonal relationship revealed by the discourse, the writer’s stance manifested by the discourse, the ideology concealed in the discourse, and the linguistic strategies adopted in the discourse. These elements are usually explored both in the genre of News Report and the genre of News Comment. Editorial as a subgenre in News Comment possesses abundant attitude resources to deliver the writer’s stances and opinions. The analysis of such a genre can help us to deconstruct the mechanics of social practices in editorials, to figure out the writer’s subjectivities in editorials, to explore the expressing models deployed in editorials, to find out the interpersonal relationship assumed by the writer, and to reveal the ideology concealed in the editorials. Based on the corpus-oriented contrastive study, the significance of this research lies in that it can assist the readers to find out the interpersonal meanings manifested by the editorials; it can help the readers to understand the social factors on the deeper layers of the editorial; it can provide analytical view angles for analysis to get better understanding of the editorial; and it can help the readers to grasp the differences between China and Western countries in terms of social structures, communication models, thinking models, and language systems. Under the background of promoting international propaganda for Chinese culture, China’s international visions and the Chinese language and literature, this study can further provide some special research angles for such fields, since discourse rhetorical strategies play important roles in the international propaganda of a country.My paper selects the editorials as the study objects mainly because the editorials possess abundant evaluation resources which attract wide interest from the discourse analysts, but the researches are far beyond complete. Most of the present studies are carried out under the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (hereafter CDA for short), exploring the discourse structure, the rhetorical devices, and the ideology reflected by these two (van Dijk,1988). CDA treats the discourse as the ideology conquering and the ideology anti-conquering. This, obviously, is not sufficient, for the relationship between the writer and the reader can also be cooperative rather than the opposite. The end of the last century saw a new theory, Appraisal Theory, rising in the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which provides a more practical analytical framework for discourse analysis. It is closely connected with the Positive Discourse Analysis (hereafter PDA for short) approach, treating the relationship between the writer and the reader as the attempt of aligning rather than disaligning. Hence the editorials are widely analyzed under the Appraisal Theory, aiming at the interpersonal meaning in the discourse. However, most of the analysis is confined on the theoretical explanation with case studies. Quite few of them involved corpus database and fewer touched the contrastive study between different language systems. Therefore, I set my analysis of editorials in the model of contrastive study with the help of database collected.My study is trying to answer the following questions:i) What kinds of appraisal resources are preferred by the genre of editorials?ii) What strategies are mainly adopted to realize the appraisals?iii) What are the differences between Chinese editorials and English editorials in regarding to the above two dimensions?iv) What are the linguistic, cultural and political causes for the differences?By answering these questions the interpersonal meaning in the editorials is annotated and collected for analysis.The methodology employed in the present research is a combination of qualitative and quantitative study. Qualitatively, after some reflections on the Appraisal Theory are earned out, a modified analysis model is proposed, laying a theoretical foundation for the stage of quantitative study. In this stage some cases of both Chinese editorials and English editorials are extracted to illustrate the principles and parameters. Quantitatively, a small corpus is manually built, which is composed of75Chinese editorials from People’s Daily (hereafter PD for short) and75English editorials from New York Times (hereafter NTY for short). The texts in the corpus are processed with the help of software ICTCLAS4.0, Concordance4.3, Antconc3.2and Spreadsheet in Microsoft for data collection. All the texts in the corpus are annotated under the modified framework, providing data to answer the four questions raised above.The results show that:i) The appraisal resources of Social Sanction System are highly deployed in editorials as means of evaluation;ii) The explicitness and graduation of appraisals in editorials are higher than those in other genres, and the realization strategies are multidimensional in editorials;iii) There are great differences between Chinese editorials and English editorials in the appraisal, revealing different interpersonal meanings;iv) The reasons for these differences are mainly from societal layer and linguistic layer, though some other factors are involved.This dissertation is a preliminary study for the practical application of the Appraisal Theory with some modifications, hoping to extend the discourse analysis to a new model. The theories of SFL, CDA, Social Norms, Rhetoric and others will be referred to build my theoretical foundations in one way or another. |
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