Subjectivity In English News Discourse: A Functional Approach

This thesis concentrates on the subjectivity of news discourse from systemic functional approach. The previous study on this field is mainly concerning three areas: expression of a speaker's perspective, expression of a speaker's affect, and expression of a speaker's modality or epistemic status. The linguists in the fields of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), cognitive linguistics and pragmatics have contributed to the study on the topic, but they are still at the initial stage and their early researches are mainly confined to literary works. Therefore, there is a big vacancy in the study of non-literary discourse. Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) has become the theoretical basis of this thesis and its theory of interpersonal meaning of language serves the cornerstone for the subjectivity study in news discourse.The originality of the study lies in the following aspects. This thesis is devoted to exploring the subjectivity in English news discourse by means of Systemic Functional Grammar. The study will not be confined to literary discourse as before. In the field of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the exploration of subjectivity by foreign scholars is mainly based upon the Appraisal theory which focuses on evaluative lexis. However, according to the survey this study has not been conducted in China and no doctoral dissertation and postgraduate thesis has touched upon this topic. This thesis, characterized by the Appraisal theory, attempts to extend the study of subjectivity to the linguistic layers beyond lexis. The modern theories of discourse analysis, especially the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which bears close relationship with Systemic Functional Linguistics, hold that the structure of Mood and Modality, transitivity (including voice) and theme-rheme structure can also be the conveyer of speaker/writer's stance and attitude. Therefore this thesis will carry the subjectivity study to the clausal and discoursal layers. In addition, the notion of subjectivity is dichotomized into micro- and macro- ones in the paper, which can be more helpful to the understanding of subjectivity in news discourse. One of the aims of this paper is to...