| Having been influenced by the difference of values and cultural background, the westernmedia always implant bias and distortion in their reports on China, which may give rise to themisunderstandings about China among the overseas public. Correspondingly, with thedevelopment of economic and political status on international stage, China needs to enhance itsinternational power of discourse and to change its public relations strategy so as to let theoverseas public know and understand China correctly. Therefore, China’s state councilinformation office launched the shooting of series of publicity films on China’s national imagein order to demonstrate a prosperous, democratic, civilized and harmonious China. The year of2011can be marked as the official beginning of China’s overseas public relations strategy, forthe publicity film on China’s national image has firstly been broadcasted on American TV,which demonstrates the determination of China to improve its international publicity force. Thisseries of films includes two parts: one is a30-second film of figures without commentary, andthe other is a15-minute documentary film dubbed with commentary. As a type of linguistic text,the commentary of publicity film usually takes the form of dubbing or subtitling to introduceand explain the content of the film or to evaluate the theme, the characters and the relevantcauses involved in the film. The commentary text is an important tool to help the film achieveits communicative goal. In view of this, it is worthwhile to study on whether the type ofcommentary text in China’s national publicity film can be the assistance to achieve thecommunicative goal or not.M.A.K. Halliday (1985), the founder of Systemic Functional Linguistics, proposes thatlanguage has three metafunctions, of which the interpersonal function is concerned withnegotiating social relations between the participants of the discourse. That is language canfunction as expressing the speaker’s statusã€attitudesã€motivations and their conclusion,judgments and evaluation towards the material in the discourse. Based on that study, JamesMartin sets up a theory termed Appraisal Theory to extend and perfect the study ofinterpersonal meaning. This theory has been widely applied into analysis of various types ofdiscourses since its birth.Therefore, this thesis grounds its main theoretical framework on Appraisal Theory and also combines the analysis of Tenor and Prosody (prosodic structure) to analyze the interpersonalmeaning of the commentary text of China’s national publicity film, aiming to probe intowhether the prosody constructed in the text can achieve its communicative goal or not, that is,letting the overseas public know and understand a real and positive image of China.Through literature review, the dissertation proposes a new model for analyzing theinterpersonal meaning and the prosodic structure, which includes three steps:1) analyzing theTenor, figuring out the status of the participants and contact between them to constructmacro-level interpersonal meaning of the text;2) Analyzing and tagging the appraisal resources(that is Attitude, Engagement and Graduation) upon which the interpersonal meaning isconstructed in the text to map unfolding interpersonal motifs from the microscopic point ofview;3) Constructing prosody of the text based on Step2in order to verify whether theinterpersonal meaning constructed by the appraisal resources corresponds with the macroscopicinteractive goals analyzed in Step1or not.The results of the study demonstrate that the prosodies constructed through the appraisalresources operate as a whole in the text to properly realize the communicative goal of thesample text. But it should be noted that the present study is merely concerned with the analysison the interpersonal meaning of the sample text from the perspective of linguistics, excludingother non-verbal factors which may make contribution to realizing the communicative goal ofthe text out of account, which is not included in the study. |
