A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And American Disaster News Reports Based On Appraisal Theory

After the publication of Martin’s work Beyond Exchange:Appraisal Systems in English, from both at home and abroad, the Appraisal theory has gained much concern and it has been developed and improved continuously. The study of Appraisal theory is a new development concerning the interpersonal meaning under the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It contains three major systems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. And the theory is mainly about linguistic resources which are used to to convey attitude and stance.With the development of the world economic globalization, the relationship between countries becomes closer and closer. Meanwhile, the impact of disaster on us human being has been enlarged dramatically. Thus, more and more attention has been paid to disaster news reports. The dissemination of disaster news reports can not only make readers have a better understanding of the disaster event itself, but also guide the masses and encourage or frustrate people’s attitudes toward the disaster. Therefore, disaster news is worthy of researchers’ concern and study. The present thesis attempts to analyze30pieces of disaster news from China Daily and USA Today from the perspective of Appraisal theory to probe into the features of disaster news. The linguistics software UAM CorpusTool is employed to explore their similarities and differences in terms of the use of Appraisal resources and to study ways of the realization of interpersonal meaning.There are three conclusions drawn from the thesis:First, both Chinese disaster news and American news employ the largest proportion of attitudinal resources, followed by Graduation and Engagement. And there is no distinct difference between the two groups in the distribution of the three types of resources. Within the Attitude system, Affect resources are preferably used in Chinese news while Appreciation resources are preferred to in American news. Second, the difference is not significant in their overall use of Engagement resources. But within the system, Expansion resources are more used in Chinese news reports, and the sub-type-Attribution resources also have more expressions in Chinese news. Third, among Graduation resources, Force rather than Focus resources are more frequently used in both Chinese and American disaster news reports.The present study may be conducive to the further development of news discourse analysis. By applying the Appraisal theory to the study of disaster news, it can extend the scope of its application. From the study, people may have a better understanding of both the Appraisal theory and disaster news report. Due to the complexity and some subjective factor of the theory and the limited knowledge of the author, the research needs further development and improvement.