Attitudinal Analyses Of American Broadsheets Coverage Of China Parade In 2009: An APPRAISAL Theory Perspective

China 60th anniversary military parade is one of the most significant events in 2009 in China. Domestic and foreign newspapers have publized a large number of reports on it. Since parade is a sensitive military activity featured with political quality, foreign newspapers inevitably have bias and misconceptions in their coverage of this event. This thesis selects ten reports from five American broadsheets and trys to prove the hypothesis that there exist some evaluative resources expressing journalists'attitudes and viewpoints in those reports. Operating within the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this thesis applies the Appraisal theory to explore the attitudinal system of those reports in both quantitive and qualitative ways.The Appraisal theory, developed by Martin and his colleagues in 1990s, is interpersonal framework concerned with lexico-grammatical resources used to express attitudes, its source and its strength. The Appraisal framework comprises three major systems, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Taken together, these systems comprehensively describe the significance of semantic resources typically associated with evaluation. Attitude is itself divided into three regions of feeling, affect, judgement and appreciation, which are explored in this thesis.The findings of this research are the followings. Firstly, it is found that ten reports are rich in attitudinal resources, of which appreciation enjoys the highest frequency, judgement the median frequency, and affect the lowest frequency. Secondly, negative attitudes outnumber positive attitudes greatly, which shows that authors of those reports mainly take criticizing and doubt attitude positions towards the Chinese parade. Thirdly, with respect to the way of realising evaluation, explicit attitudes are predominant over implicit attitudes. Although one principle of news writing is objectiveness and impartiality, these authors tend to express their attitudes and stances explicitly and directly in their articles. In addition, some newspapers are comparatively objective while others are obviously biased, which is concerned with the political and social backgrounds of these newspapers.This thesis shows that it is feasible and reasonable to use Appraisal theory to analyze those reports, and we can get a better understanding of how interpersonal meanings are construed in those reports by means of attitudinal analysis. Also it proves that Chinese readers should strengthen their cultural awareness when reading Western news and consciously unveil the hidden ideologies within the discourses.