A Study On The Appraisal Words In Financial Times Articles Based On Appraisal Theory

Since entering the21st century of information age, the news media gets into all aspects of human life with unprecedented depth and breadth and becomes the most influential type of discourse. Based on the Appraisal Theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics, through the analysis of selected samples in the authoritative publication Financial Times, this thesis explores the distributions and features of appraisal words and the underling reasons for that and then discusses how the writer uses appraisal words to persuasively express his/her viewpoints and stances in order to negotiate affect, engagement and graduation with readers. Besides, the most frequently used40appraisal words in the selected samples are discussed in detail.This thesis focuses on the current economic issues and selects30pieces of Financial Times articles about the twice downgrades of French sovereign credit rating in2012for analysis. Combined with the assistance of professional statistical software AntConc and the support of three subsystems in Appraisal Theory, it is found that the proportion of graduation is higher than that of engagement while the attitude words are the least. As for attitude analysis, judgement and appreciation words far outnumber affect words. Under engagement system, intra-vocalization and dialogic expansion words are more than extra-vocalization and dialogic contraction words. The two subcategories within graduation have extremely unbalanced distributions, that is, force is used much more frequently than focus. The main reasons are that writers want to objectively and persuasively express their opinions, meanwhile, subtly put into their personal stances in order to better negotiate with potential readers.Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in the thesis which attempts to employ AT to find the language using skills of discourse constructor and the realization way of evaluation. Meanwhile, this thesis provides a scientific foundation for exploring the financial language, so as to provide some instructions for further studying, teaching and reading.