| We live in an age of information and various news reports provide us with much information, keeping us informed of what is happening around the world. A news headline is a fundamental part of any piece of news report, which has the functions of summarizing the whole news, helping readers to evaluate the news, and attracting the readers. News headlines are rich in appraisal resources, but the previous studies on news headlines focused on grammatical, lexical and rhetorical features while few evaluative studies or systematic theoretical analysis have been made.Based on Appraisal Theory (AT), this research combines quantitative and qualitative research methods and makes a contrastive analysis of Chinese and English news headlines from the lexical, grammatical and discourse levels with a view to revealing the evaluative features of news headlines, and pointing out and interpreting the major similarities and differences in Chinese and English news headlines. To do that, the researcher collects 300 news headlines from some major newspapers in China, to be specific, The People's Daily, The Guangming Daily and The China Youth Daily, and at the same time,300 English news headlines are collected from The Guardian, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Then two corresponding corpora are established:the Chinese news headlines (CNHS) and the English news headlines (ENHS). With the help of computer, these headlines are annotated and calculated from three subsystems (attitude, engagement and graduation) and their subcategories of AT. Attitude helps us to reveal affect, judgement and appreciation in headlines; Engagement helps us to source these "attitudes" while Graduation can upscale or downscale these "attitudes".According to statistics, we find that both Chinese and English news headlines are rich in appraisal resources. In CNHS we find 692 appraisal values and in ENHS 653. By a contrastive analysis, we find that CNHS have more Attitudinal and Engagement resources while in ENHS Engagement resources outnumber those in CNHS. Upon further investigation, we find that in CNHS positive attitudes are predominant while in ENHS the opposite is the case. The reason is that most of Chinese news reports are positive to achieve the purpose of propaganda. In order to make the headlines concise, authoritative and objective, both CNHS and ENHS employ quite a few Monogloss. ENHS have more Heteroglossic resources. In this respect, it is also found that ENHS have more dialogic expansion resources than dialogic contraction resources, which is just opposite to the case in CNHS. Chinese headlines tend to close down the space for dialogic alternatives, which can make the news authoritative and collectivism-oriented. In Graduation, it is found that both CNHS and ENHS have quite a large ration of Force resources and very few Focus resources, which may be due to the conciseness requirement of headlines. With respect to Force, there are far more upscaling resources than downscaling ones. An interpretation of the similarities and differences of the evaluative language in Chinese and English news headlinese from cultural and ideological aspects is given.This study has revealed the features of the evaluative language in headlines and has pointed out and interpreted the significant similarities and differences between Chinese headlines and English headlines from the perspective of AT. It is hoped that this study can contribute to the research of news discourse, and it is also the researcher's wish that this study can help us better understand and write news headlines. This study applies AT into the analysis of the news headlines, which has not been touched upon before. It provides a new perspective into the research and application of AT, and promotes the further development of this new theory. |
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