Opinions On Migrant Workers In The Press

The thesis aims to analyze opinions on migrant workers in the texts of newspaper comment articles in the framework of semantic theories of evaluation developed in Systemic Functional Linguistics with a view to revealing what linguistic elements are employed for the realization of opinion-related meaning and especially what kinds of values are loaded in the writers' expression of opinions on this special social group.On a brief account of problems that emerge in news reports of migrant workers in media researches, the thesis suggests approaching the complexity of opinions on migrant workers in the press from a linguistic perspective. Theories about evaluation, developed along the direction of research on the interpersonal meaning in language, are fit for the analysis of media texts of opinions.Evaluation is used to express speakers' or writers' opinion, and in doing so to reflect the value system of those persons and their community. Within this cover term, a series of theories focusing on different aspects of the opinion-related meaning are combined. Opinions can be those of the writer's, or those built in the discourse, or those of the attributed sources. Therefore, the multi-layer nature of opinions in the text should be coped with. The model of discourse planes is adopted in the research as the macro framework to recognize linguistic elements laden with different types of values. Within it, comparative, subjective, expressive vocabulary is categorized as appraisal resources or stance markers and clause relations contributing to evaluative cohesion are grouped.Both qualitative and quantitative analytical approaches are applied in the thesis in an attempt to demonstrate the opinion-related meaning in comment articles about migrant workers. To make things clear, three pieces of articles were selected from thirty comment articles in fifteen Chinese newspapers. A pilot studyis made into the data from two categories of newspaper, the official, political newspaper and the less official, city daily or evening news. With findings from the pilot study, a selective study and a comparative analysis are taken for specific features and patterns of opinions expressed in comment articles.The linguistic research of the press comment texts leads to the conclusion that opinion-related values in this genre can be conveyed at lexical, clausal, grammatical and textual levels and also that a strong preference exists across all the texts for opinions expressed as judgment rather than affect. That is to say, the writers are more concerned with migrant workers' behaviors and the objective world than the emotional aspect. The writers of the three articles under investigation show a similar willingness to evaluate explicitly. That suggests that in the press comment texts the commentator's voice is often applied. But there are different tendencies identified between official, political newspapers and less official, city dailies or evening news. The former tends to adopt impersonal, panorama perspective on the commented issues and therefore the vocabulary with lower degree of intensity in emotion and judgment are preferred. The latter tends to adopt personalized perspective on the commented issues and thus prefers expressive vocabulary with higher degree of emotional or judgment intensity.The analysis may benefit the search for solutions to the problems with press reports of migrant workers and also the teaching of comment texts. As the evaluative meaning is closely related with the writers' ideological position, the analysis will definitely enable the reader to be better-informed of the implicit opinion loaded in the press concerning the social vulnerable groups in China and thus contributes to the understanding of the underlying meaning of media texts.