| Though it is an everyday phenomenon, evaluation is a fuzzy concept which has been viewed from distinctive perspectives. As a specific form of news comment, an editorial has also been debated heatedly regarding its essence. Although evaluation in newspaper editorials is not a new topic for discussion, its relation to interpersonal meaning has been bringing forth interest and further fascination. The present study aims to provide one conceivable train of thought to approach this problem in the hope that original insights could be obtained. The research has the concrete objective to answer four questions:(1) What is meant by evaluation?(2) What is meant by newspaper editorials?(3) What could be counted as a reliable theoretical framework to address the interpersonally-and socially-oriented evaluation?(4) How do the editorialists succeed in manipulating their rhetorical strategies to accomplish effective evaluation in their editorials?Through reviewing previous studies, we consider evaluation as a person’s conveyance of his calculation or approximation of the value, significance, worth of people, entities, events, phenomena to another person; and it is believed to be transmitted through discourse in any mode of expression. By comparing three approaches to the issue, the study prefers to use Appraisal proposed by Martin and White (2005) as the theoretical framework for solving the problem. However, we are sure that immediate application of the theory to our analysis of the newspaper editorials is deemed to be a rash decision.Our additional enquiry into the theory verifies several problematic aspects, including, among others, the imperfect system of ATTITUDE, and the uncertainties caused by modality-related issues. Based on this belief, the theoretical framework undergoes relevant enhancement. We argue that the updated APPRAISAL poses as a more workable scheme for analysing evaluation in English newspaper editorials.To study evaluation in English editorials, altogether20editorials are collected chronologically in a period of three months in2012from two influential English newspapers, i.e. The Washington Post and The Daily Telegraph, each of which contributes to half of the leading articles. The editorial texts are then put into analysis quantitatively and qualitatively, in terms of attitude, engagement and graduation in accordance with the improved Appraisal theory. The results demonstrate that the distributions of lexico-grammatical features have important implications.In terms of attitude, judgments and affects are widely distributed in the majority of the editorial texts, and only a small proportion of them are devoted to appreciation. This fact implies that editorials function primarily to enable the writer to register emotional response to a person, entity, event, or phenomenon on the one hand, and to evaluate people or their patterns of behaviour on the other hand, rather than to assess certain things.As for engagement, the lexical and grammatical devices also form certain patterns. The heteroglosses are the most dominating type over monoglosses in editorials. Compared with heterogloss, monoglossic resources are rare in both sets of editorials. This conforms to the assumption that a text is construed as a heteroglossic background where voices pervade to maintain interpersonal relationship.As the third type of appraising resources, graduating devices are as common as attitudes and engagements in the two groups of editorials. Forces take a lead as regards distribution, and focuses follow. This distribution in the two sets of editorials serves for the editorialist-reader interactions.All the obtained results convincingly prove our previous conclusion on the essence of an editorial, i.e. it is an institutional discourse realised by the author’s tactical planning of language materials to maintain harmony writh his readership. |
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