English Political News Discourse Analysis From The Perspective Of The Appraisal Theory

As a new approach of linguistics, Appraisal Theory develops out of the interpersonal function within Systemic Functional Linguistics. According to White (2001), Appraisal Theory is concerned with the linguistic resources by which the writer or speaker can express their attitudes, get involved in propositions, and grade the assessments of meanings. It is divided into three sub-systems: attitude, engagement, and graduation. And under each system, several branches or sub-systems are defined.With the maturity of Appraisal Theory, the system of engagement has been applied to analyze many types of discourses. However, there are still few researches related to the engagement resources in English political news discourses. Adopted the discourse semantics approach, this thesis aims to make a tentative research by applying Appraisal Theory into the analysis of the discourses of English political news with the purpose of investigating which engagement resource is preferred by the authors to accord with the demands of English political news. The application of Appraisal Theory to English political news discourses is an innovative approach and a necessary complement to explore the ideologies and intersubjective stance encoded in this type of texts.Focusing on engagement resources on the discourse level, this thesis applies Appraisal Theory (under Martin & White, 2005) to analyze 10 English political news discourses chosen from the New York Times with a total 5936 words by the application of the UAM CorpusTool. In this thesis, quantitative research will be done to uncover the distribution of different engagement resources, and qualitative research will also be done to give explanation for the deeper understanding of the theory.The thesis is mainly composed of four chapters. Chapter one is the literature review which first gives a brief account of news discourse and political news discourse. An overall review of Appraisal Theory is also included in this chapter. Chapter two describes the theoretical framework which discusses the three sub-systems of Appraisal Theory—attitude, engagement, and graduation with the emphasis on the category of engagement. Meanwhile, the feasibility of the research is discussed in this part. Chapter three is the data collection and research methodology. In this part, mention is made of how the UAM CorpusTool measures the distribution of engagement resources in the ten English political news texts. Chapter four applies engagement system to the analysis of English political news discourses, examining how engagement resources perform functionalities in this type of discourses.By dint of the UAM CorpusTool, the general occurrences of the engagement resources are reported where the means of all values within this system add up to 100%. The coded statistics shows that there are altogether 208 engagement resources. Between its two variables, contract with 75 occurrences accounts for 36.06%, and expand with 133 occurrences accounts for 63.94%. Expand resources which are prevalent become the salient stylistic feature of English political news discourses. Under the contract category, disclaim is prominent in the engagement system, accounting for 85.33% of the contract resources. Deny occupies 57.81% of the disclaim type. Added together, the resources that are used to contract the dialogic space occupy 36.06% of the clauses. Under the expand resources, attribute, which accounts for 62.41% of this type, is the resources used most frequently by the news authors. It is one way to open up more dialogic space for the alternative voices.It is of great importance to attempt to make a tentative research of the analysis of English political news discourses from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. Studying engagement resources in English political news texts plays an important role in further understanding the Appraisal framework and English political news. It sheds some light on the cultivation of language awareness and English teaching and learning. The thesis appears rather preliminary and tentative in nature, however, it is still hoped that it can contribute to the current research of the discourses analysis of English political news from the perspective of the Appraisal to some degree.