Appraisal Analysis Of Political Editorials In American Newspaper

The journalistic discourse was studied from the perspective of discourse analysis from the 1990s. Editorial, as a sub-genre of journalistic discourse, expresses the media's attitude and stance by mainly explaining and commenting on the important events and problems, to infect and persuade its readers. Therefore, editorial is a kind of persuasive discourse, whose appraisal means and features of appraisal are worthy our study. However, there are few researches having been done. This thesis applies the appraisal theory, specifically speaking, the sub-system of attitude to analyzing political editorials. Thus, the main features of expressing attitude in political editorials are obtained and this paper also explains the reasons why editorials have those features. This research makes it possible that the genre features of editorial can be found from the perspective of interpersonal function, and the teaching of foreign language reading and writing will also benefit from this research.The data analyzed in this paper came from the official website of Washington Post: www.washingtonpost.com. A certain number of political editorials were obtained by putting "political editorial" in the searching bar of the website. According to this thesis's needs, 10 political editorials that have words between 400 and 500 were selected. This thesis combines descriptive with interpretative methodology to analyze the data. First, those words and grammatical structures expressing attitude were identified in the light of the sub-system attitude of the appraisal theory. Then a statistical research is done to the percentage of each kind of value, and a descriptive comparison of those values is made. At the same time, an interpretative explanation of the preference of the data is given. Through the analysis it is hoped that those prominent features could be summarized that are typical of English editorials in American newspaper.The thesis finds several main features of expressing attitude in political editorials by applying the above stated methodology. Firstly, the sample analysis reveals that values of affect, judgment, appreciation are all used in political editorials, but their frequency is different. Secondly, the preliminary and overall statistics show that the value of judgment is the most frequently used in political editorial to express their attitude, which accounts for 55.9% in the total values of attitude. The second is the grammatical resources of appreciation, and the least is the values of affect. Thirdly, the analysis of the value of judgment finds that there are more values of social esteem than social sanction. And in all kinds of values of judgment, capacity ranks first. Furthermore, the values of judgment are expressed more explicitly. On the whole, these features of values' distribution serve for the purpose of political editorials. Besides, those features may also be related to the American cultural background and ideology.The findings of this paper are helpful to the teaching of critical reading. Such a research will help students grasp the attitudinal meanings of political editorials so that they can understand editorials better. And this paper also shows that the appraisal theory is suitable to analyze political editorials, thus it provides a new perspective to study editorials.This thesis is mainly composed of five parts. Part One is an introduction of the selected topic. Part Two summarizes the previous research of editorial and the appraisal theory, and states the theoretical framework of this thesis. Part Three applies the sub-system of attitude to analyze the data, describes the features of the expressing ways of attitude and at the same time explains the reasons. Part Four is the findings of this research. Part Five is a conclusion of the whole thesis.