Attitudinal Meaning In English War Coverage From The Perspective Of Graduation

Recently, the international situation is unpredictable, and wars break out constantly. The Libyan war has been concerned by many people, which makes it become one of the hot issues. Currently, war coverage has received more and more attention, but the previous research on war coverage mainly from the perspective of military strategies or mass communications with little attention on linguistic theories. This thesis will try to study the Libyan war coverage from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.Appraisal theory is the development of interpersonal meaning of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The theory is a new framework, consisting of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Attitude is the central of the three sub-systems, which concerns with human emotion, behavior and aesthetic conceptions; Engagement serves to realize the interaction between the addresser and the addressees; Graduation, which is used to scales the intensity or boundary categories of the evaluation, can express Attitude in a more accurate and efficient way. The thesis will adopt qualitative and quantitative analytical methods to study the50war coverage from American newspaper—IME from the perspective of Graduation, under the help of UAM Corpus Tool. In this thesis, the distribution of Graduation resources and gradable attitudinal resources as well as their functions will be explored. Through the analysis, the findings can be seen in the following. Firstly, the TIME authors use more up-scale Force, especially, Intensification resources and Quantification resources. Through the detailed report about the whole process of the war and the utilization of abundant figures, the authors present a cruel war to readers, thus, they arouse the readers’anger towards the dictator and persuade them to support the international intervention. Secondly, there are more intensified Appreciation resources. Appreciation resources are different from Affection resources and Judgement resources, for Appreciation resources do not describe the characteristics of human being or their behaviors, but the phenomenon and the process of the events, thus avoid personal affectual response and direct assessment towards people’behaviors, which will make the coverage become more objective. Thirdly, towards different targets, the writers use more negative intensified Judgement resources to describe Gaddafi, and more intensified Affect resources to evoke the readers’ empathy towards the rebels and the civilians.This thesis mainly studies the features of Graduation resources and gradable attitudinal resources in war coverage from the perspective of Graduation system, and gives a try to study war coverage from the linguistic perspective. It is hoped the thesis can shed light on other areas’ Graduation study, such as advertisement, letters, speech, etc. Meanwhile, it is also hoped the thesis may arouse more attention to the study of Graduation resources and develop and strengthen students’ awareness of Graduation in foreign language teaching, in order to improve their understanding of English discourses characteristics.