A Comparative Analysis Of Chinese And English News Reports On The Opening Ceremony Of Beijing Olympic Games, 2008

The Appraisal Theory is developed from the research on the interpersonal meaning in language. After 15 years of study, Martin and White has updated and modified the Appraisal Theory in their publication The Language of Evaluation:Appraisal in English. According to Martin and White, evaluation is used to express speakers' or writers'opinions, and in doing so to reflect the value system of those persons and their community. The Appraisal Theory, a newly-developed lexico-grammatical framework for studying interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics, is concerned with varieties of attitudes negotiable in a text. It is a breakthrough for studying interpersonal meaning and provides us with a new theoretical framework to interpret interpersonal meaning in discourse. The Chinese and English news reports on the opening ceremony of Beijing Olympic Games,2008 are full of attitudes and appraisals that foreign and Chinese media offer toward the Beijing Olympic Games. Thus, the Appraisal theory, a newly-developed interpersonal functional theory, presents us a proper framework to interpret the interpersonal meaning in the news reports.Under the framework of Appraisal Theory, the thesis aims to analyze the appraisal resources of Chinese and English news reports on the opening ceremony of Beijing Olympic Games with a view to revealing what linguistic elements realize the appraisal meaning and especially how the three sub-systems of Appraisal Theory, namely, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation are realized in the news reports. By analyzing the appraisal resources and comparing the Chinese and English news reports, the writer concludes the distributional features of appraisal resources and the linguistic features of the Chinese and English news reports on the opening ceremony of Beijing Olympic Games. This study respectively takes nine Chinese news reports and nine English news reports as samples. We will make a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the distributional features of appraisal resources. Based on our analysis, it is found that positive attitudes are predominant and play an important role in abridging the interpersonal gap between the news reports writers and the readers. At the same time, this paper tries to explore the appraisal meaning in the Chinese and English news reports on the opening ceremony of Beijing Olympic Games within the framework of Appraisal Theory, which provides a new theoretical perspective to interpret the news reports and promotes the development of research on the news reports in the field of foreign language studies. Meanwhile, it further validates the practicability and interpretive power of the Appraisal Theory, enlarges its range of applications and provides some useful implications for its application in the news reports.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to the whole thesis, namely, the rationale, the purpose and significance of the thesis and the organization of the thesis. Chapter 2 is an introduction to the theoretical framework of Appraisal Theory. At the very beginning of this chapter, the author will briefly introduce the framework of Appraisal theory and introduce its sub-systems in detail. The previous studies of Appraisal Theory will also be mentioned in this chapter. In Chapter 3, the author will first introduce the research methodology of the thesis, and then focus on introducing the procedure of the data analysis in order to make a quantitative and qualitative research on the distribution of appraisal resources, for example, the objectives of the data analysis, the scientific classification of the charts or tables, etc. In chapter 4, by analyzing the result of the research, the author will conclude the distinguishable features of Chinese and English news reports on the opening ceremony of Beijing Olympic Games, thus provide reasons for the similarities and differences of the features of Chinese and English news reports. Chapter 5 is the conclusion of the whole thesis. This chapter will emphasize on the major findings of the thesis, the implications and the limitation of the thesis.