Political Editorials In The Guardian And China Daily: A Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The editorial, an argumentative genre published in the newspaper, comments onimportant event, incident and issue on behalf of the editorial department. Since early1990s, there has been a growing interest in the area of linguistics. However, morestudies emerging from across the globe have paid attention to register, genericstructure potential, and stylistic analysis, the field of semantics of evaluation hasremained almost untouched. Semantics of evaluation studies that the language isvalued by the language of the writer. Appraisal Theory is an attempt of it.Appraisal Theory was proposed by Martin and his colleagues in the early1990s,which was based on the interpersonal metafunction theory of Halliday’sSystemic-Functional Linguistics. The present study aims to compare the use ofappraisal resources in China Daily and The Guardian by examining eight editorials onDiaoyu Islands issue from August to October in2012within the framework of threesubsystems of Appraisal Theory.The results show significant cross-cultural and cross-language variations betweenthe two newspapers regarding to the values of appraisal. First, the proportion ofengagement resources is big in both China Daily and The Guardian; Second, theengagement resources are much more frequently employed in China Daily than thosein The Guardian; Third, attitude and graduation resources appear more often in TheGuardian than those of China Daily; Fourth, The Guardian contains more than twiceas many graduation resources as China Daily. Finally, the reasons behind all thesedifferences are provided in terms of cultural type, ideology, worldview, religious andformality of speech.All in all, this research is supposed to make some contribution to the contrastivestudy between Chinese political editorials and British political editorials and offer anew perspective to the writers and readers of journalism with more cross-cultural andcross-language consciousness.