| Appraisal Theory, originating and developing from Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar, is the extension of the interpersonal metafunction of the System-Functional Grammar. It mainly focuses on these appraisal resources which are used toexpress emotion, attitude and position in texts. It has been widely applied to variousdiscourses as an analytic tool, such as news, speech, literature, advertising, etc.However, most of the researches reveal the hidden ideology of texts with critical andnegative attitude from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (hereafter CDA),which focuses on the inequality and conflict of texts, and easily misleads the public.CDA is not conducive to playing a constructive role of discourses. Therefore, PositiveDiscourse Analysis (hereafter PDA), put forward by Martin as a new discourseanalysis perspective, construes texts from the point of constructive and positiveattitude. It deals with some social contradictions and unfair phenomena with a morepositive attitude, which is different with CDA. It aims to establish a harmonioussociety through discourse analysis.Consequently, in the paper, the news on plasticizer incident in Taiwan isconstrued by using a qualitative method based on Appraisal Theory. The studyattempts to answer the following questions:1) How do various appraisal resourcesdistribute and what are the reasons for the distribution in the chosen news discourse?2)What is the attitude of the People’s Daily to the plasticizer incident in Taiwan?3)How do journalists provide a discourse platform for the disadvantaged and coordinatethe conflict between the mainland and Taiwan by effectively using appraisal resources?Qualitative analytical approach is applied in the thesis to reach the conclusion.Firstly, it can be concluded that the distribution of appraisal resources is not balancedin texts, which is caused by the different roles of the subsystems in Appraisal Theoryand the characteristics of news discourse. Secondly, it can be seen that plasticizerincident is reported objectively and timely by the People’s Daily. Journalists just make a positive or negative evaluation towards people and their behaviors involved in theincident. They do not express any emotional language attack, which is conducive toestablishing a close relationship between media and putative readers, to uniting thepeople. Finally, the research shows that various evaluation resources of appraisalsystem greatly promotes news discourses to play a positive function, which isconducive to fighting for equal discourse rights for different interest groups. From theperspective of PDA, the appraisal resources in news discourse contribute to theconstruction of a harmonious society. |
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