| News interview is not only a vehicle for eliciting and communicating, but also a form of interpersonal communication between IE (interviewee), IR (interviewer) and the audiences. Based on the Appraisal Theory, this thesis explores the distribution patterns and frequencies of Engagement resources in different parts of English news interview together with the similarities and differences between IE text and IR text in terms of Engagement values and its sub-domains. In theory, the engagement system mainly includes dialogic expansive resources and the dialogic contractive resources. This thesis altered the original Engagement system a little by adopting "If, "Try verb" and "Graduation" in the scheme. As to the corpora, twenty transcriptions of news interview are selected randomly to analyze how the Engagement resources are distributed to make the interview informative, interesting and easy-to-comprehend for the audiences. The Systemic Coder is used to measure the distribution of the Engagement resources in English news interview from NPR news on Mideast affairs and to give interpretation accordingly. The results of this thesis are helpful for us to have a better understanding of the characteristics of English news interview.The general distribution of Engagement resources in English news interview on the whole is: generally Expand (55.7%, 1486 instances) is more popular than Contract (44.3%, 1182 instances); in Expand, the most favored values are Modal-auxiliary (539 instances) in sub-system Entertain as Modality; in Contract, the resources mostly resorted to are Deny values (444 instances).In the IE text: Contract values (852 instances) nearly equal Expand values (886 instances). Entertain is the most frequently used values in Engagement system with 738 instances, in which Modal auxiliary (288 instances) is the most preferable value under Modality (583 instances). The leading resources in Contract are Deny values (304 instances) in Disclaim type.In the IR text: the Expand values (65.2%, 344 instances) exceed Contract values (34.7%, 183 instances) by more than 30 percent points; the resources mostly resorted to in Contract are Deny values (72 instances) within Disclaim type; the most favored resources in Expand values are Modal-auxiliary values (130 instances) in sub-system Entertain as Modality.In the opening text: the Expand values (57.1%, 60 instances) are still more than the Contract values (41.9%, 44 instances). What difference from data in the IE and IR text is: Counter (17.1%, 18 instances) instead of Deny (12.4%, 13 instances) become the most preferred values; in addition, the Acknowledge values (28.7%, 27 instances) under Attribute type (25.7%, 27 instances) surpass the Modal auxiliary (10.5%, 11 instances) under Modality (17.1%, 18 instances) and become the most favored within Expand system.The similarities between IE and IR texts are: in Contract, the higher frequency of Deny in Disclaim, Pronounce in Proclaim, and Stress in Pronounce; in Expand, the most favored type is Modality in Entertain and Modal auxiliary in Modality.The differences between IE and IR texts are: the engagement points presented in IE text are barrels more than those of IR text. The IE text resorts to more Intensifier, Stress and Affirm than the IR text, whereas, the IRs tend to use more Acknowledge than IEs do.Appraisal Theory, especially the Engagement system, is of great importance to the development of interpersonal meaning of SFL. Studying Engagement resources in English news interview plays a very important role in furthering our understanding of both AT and English news interview. Hopefully, the research will push forward the research on language and the cognition of human being. |
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