The Construction Of Writer-Reader Interaction In English Editorial Discourse: An Appraisal Approach

Editorial discourse is called the heart and soul of the newspaper and it plays an important role in conveying information and newspaper's opinions to influence the viewpoints or ideology of common people. Therefore, for a long time, a large amount of studies on editorial discourse from different perspectives have been conducted. However, these studies rarely pay attention to the construction of interaction between the editorial writer and putative readers. In this thesis, the author applies the theoretical framework—Appraisal theory to explore how Appraisal values are used as interactive strategies to construct writer-reader interaction in editorial discourse.Appraisal theory, the adopted theoretical framework in this thesis, is concerned with the social function of the Appraisal resources. It provides means by which editorial writers express their attitudes, take a particular stance, engage with various value positions and negotiate with potential respondents, thus interacting with potential respondents and aligning them into the value positions of the writers'. Appraisal itself is regionalized as three interacting domains—Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, which are also called the three subsystems. These three subsystems are explored to discover what the general frequency of these three values is in editorial discourse, how these three values work together to achieve the effect of interaction between the writer and putative readers. With respect to the three sections of editorial discourse—introduction section, body section and conclusion section, the questions of what the distribution feature of these three values is in different sections, and of how the distribution of each Appraisal value in different sections helps realize the purpose of each section, thus indirectly influencing interaction between the writer and putative readers are explored.To solve these questions, both qualitative and quantitative analysis are adopted to study the 32 randomly selected editorials downloaded from The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/) and The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/). The publishing time of these editorials is ranging from December 1st to December 31st in the year 2007. Systemic Coder (version 4.5 Coder 468) is adopted as the instrument to get the occurrence of all Appraisal values and the distribution feature of each Appraisal value in different sections of editorial discourse.The statistical data reveals that 1,654 Appraisal resources are adopted to be facilitative in forming interactive relationship between the writer and putative readers. Among these Appraisal resources, Attitude value accounts for 24.3% (402 instances); Engagement value takes up 34.9% (578 instances); and Graduation value accounts for 40.8% (674 instances). It is obvious that to some extent Graduation value outweighs the other two Appraisal values—Attitude and Engagement, which indicates that in editorial discourse the editorial writer prefers to use grading meanings to increase or decrease the force of their assertions to influence putative readers. Within Graduation system, Graduation as Force is much preferred to Graduation as Focus. This is to some extent due to the fact that Focus resource is itself very rare. Therefore, in the process of constructing writer-reader interaction, Force is much preferred by the editorial writer to express grading meanings to persuade putative readers. In expressing Graduation as Force, both Intensification and Quantification are used by editorial writers nearly to the same extent. They are all important resources to express Force.Editorial writers also resort to different Engagement resources and actively engage with various external voices, negotiating relationships of alignment or disalignment with readers by presenting different value positionings and dialogic alternatives. Engagement resources take up more than one third of all the Appraisal resources, and within Engagement system, dialogic contraction and dialogic expansion are used nearly to the same extent. Both of them are very important for editorial writers to either close down or open up dialogic space. When the editorial writer aims to open up dialogic space and engage with external voices to establish relationship of interaction with putative readers, he/she prefers to adopt dialogic expansion to invite various alternatives. When the editorial writer aims to align putative readers into his/her viewpoint and maintain his/her authority in the value position, he/she resorts to dialogic contraction to exclude other voices. In this way, interaction between the editorial writer and putative readers is constructed.Besides the use of Graduation resources and Engagement resources in the editorial discourse, Attitude resources also to some extent play an important role in expressing the writer's evaluation of things or persons and influencing the judgments of putative readers in order to construct interactive relationship between the writer and potential respondents. Within Attitude type, Appreciation outweighs to a large extent the other two Attitude values—Affect and Judgment. The editorial writer's preference for Appreciation instead of emotional Affect and normative Judgment is in accordance with this specific genre—editorial discourse in which the editorial writer has to state the subject, explain the issue and its details.Based on these results obtained from the data, the author gives a detailed analysis of how each Appraisal value and its subcategories are used, though to different extent, strategically and skillfully to achieve interaction between the writer and putative readers.As for the distribution feature of each Appraisal value in different sections, the statistical data reveals that the Attitude value is mainly distributed in the introduction part; within Engagement system, Disclaim is mainly distributed in the introduction part; Proclaim is nearly mainly distributed in the body part; Entertain is distributed in the body part and conclusion part; though sparse, Attribute is mainly distributed in the body part. Graduation value is distributed in all of the three parts, with the body part being the part in which Graduation is most frequently used. After giving a detailed analysis of their distribution features and the reasons for the distribution features, the author finds that in different sections of editorial discourse, different Appraisal values are selectively and strategically used to different extent to better realize the purpose of each section and to better serve the purpose of interacting with putative readers.The thesis contributes to Appraisal theory by applying it to explore the construction of writer-reader interaction in editorial discourse which is a new perspective. It offers pedagogical implications for students to be critical readers by either entering into the value positions of editorial writers or putting forward their own opinions different from those of editorial writers. What's more, the analysis of Appraisal resources used as interactive strategies in editorial discourse can be beneficial to the field of translation for the true reproduction of the original evaluation and purposes of interaction.