| News comment is a special sub-genre of news. News comments not only inform people of the latest news, but also analyze and judge what happens in the news, thus enable people to learn far more beyond the news facts. News comments carry the social function of influencing and persuading the potential readers to take the same stance with the commentators through the attitudes and opinions it holds, further to take actions. Such function of evaluation and persuasion is a self-evident reason why news comments are evaluative in nature.Appraisal Theory, considered as the extension of interpersonal meta-function of Systemic-Functional Grammar (hereafter SFG), is a contribution mainly made by J.R. Martin in 1990s. This theory escapes the limitation of mood and modality on the research of interpersonal meaning, thus provides a new angle for discourse analysis. Appraisal Theory focuses on attitudinal negotiation in discourse. That negotiation is mainly realized by the application of a series of lexical and grammatical resources. Martin categorizes those lexical appraisal resources into three sub-systems: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Each of them contains their own sub-categories.At present, very few researches on discourse analysis of news comments are concerned with Appraisal Theory. This research is just a tentative try to apply Appraisal Theory to the analysis of news comments to find out its general features in the realization of interpersonal meaning and to compare and contrast the different appraisal strategies applied by Chinese and American news commentators. To ensure the credibility of this research, all the materials used for the analysis are from the official websites of China Daily and The New York Times. All the news comments chosen are about the domestic social issues of public focus.The following conclusions are obtained through analysis:First, it is found that all the sub-types of Attitude appraisal are employed by commentators to fulfill the interpersonal functions of news comments, of which more Judgment and Appreciation than Affect are used to avoid the subjectivity of news comments, which is in accordance with the persuasive and evaluative social function of news comments.Second, significant differences exist in the application of appraisal strategies between Chinese news commentators and American news commentators. In terms of the number of occurrence of attitudinal appraisal resources, there is a higher frequency of occurrence of appraisal resources in American news comments than that in Chinese news comments. Taking a look at the sub-categories of Attitude, it is found that Chinese commentators exhibit a strong preference for encoding Attitude as Appreciation while their American counterparts display a strong preference for encoding Attitude as Judgment; in terms of the pattern of appraisal, differences are found in the distribution of appraisal resources in each sub-categories of Attitude appraisal system. Chinese commentators are inclined to employ non-authorial Affect resources, Social Esteem Judgment resources and Valuation as Appreciation, while their American counterparts have a stronger preference to applying authorial Affect resources, Social Sanction Judgment resources and Reaction as Appreciation; in terms of appraisal modes, although both commentators in two countries intend to encode attitude explicitly, significant difference exists in the application of implicit appraisal resources. Chinese news commentators use more implicit appraisal resources than their American counterparts. Such disparities are rooted in the difference of cultural values between two countries. Influenced by Confucianism, Chinese collectivist cultural value makes Chinese people value the group and harmony. To maintain harmonious interpersonal relationship, they intend to express their attitudes and opinions in an indirect, unassertive and implicit way. On contrast, Americans are under the influence of Christianity, and individualism stresses the freedom of communication and expression. They think highly of the direct, assertive and explicit style of communication.This study provides a new perspective for the study of Evaluative Discourse Analysis. Appraisal theory is confirmed to be an effective tool in discourse analysis. It also enlightens English learners to be good evaluative readers and writers as well as good cross-cultural communicators. |
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