An Appraisal Perspective Study On The Attitudinal Meanings In News Reports

The Appraisal Theory, a newly-developed lexico-grammatical frameworkfor studying interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics, isconcerned with varieties of attitudes in a text and provides us with a newtheoretical framework to interpret interpersonal meaning in discourse. AppraisalTheory consists of three systems, namely Attitude, Engagement and Graduation.Attitude system, which is the key of Appraisal Theory, is made up of threesubcategories: Affect, Judgement and Appreciation.The data are selected from the news reports of three main medium: ChinaDaily, BBC and Reuters.20pieces of news reports on2010Shanghai WorldExpo was chosen, in order to make a detailed quantitative analysis andsummarization about the distributions and the features of those appraisalresources and try to figure out which kind of attitudinal resources the writers ofthe news discourse prefer to use and shows us the attitudes of the new reporterstowards such a global and magnificent international Exhibition.In view of the above considerations, based on qualitative research method,this thesis tries to analyze the news discourse which is about2010ShanghaiWorld Expo. from the three perspectives of appraisal theory: affect, judgementand appreciation. It founds that the distributions of the three subcategories ofattitude (i.e. Affect, Judgment and Appreciation) is somewhat different. Thefrequency of affect, judgement and appreciation is23.6%,11.8%and64.6%.The statistics demonstrates that writers have a strong preference to appreciationwhen they want to express their viewpoints and stances, and they are trying toavoid more personalized expressions of feelings, as well as ethical judgments ofpeople and their behaviors; Under appreciation, the study shows us thedistribution of valuation is by far the highest than those of reaction andcomposition. The news discourse reporters have a strong preference for valuation in the chosen news report on the2010Shanghai World Expo incontrast to reaction or composition. By using the appreciation resources, thisnews report shows us the deep influence of the international Exhibition has leftto us, implies the news reporter’s evaluation towards the2010Shanghai WorldExpo and it also shows its readers the scale of Shanghai World Expo and theimplications it has delivered to the reader, in order to establish a commonunderstanding with the potential reader. At the same time, the frequency of thepositive attitudinal resources (84.49%) outweighs that of the negative attitudinalresources (15.51%) when the writers of the news discourse want to show theirown feelings and attitudes. This statistics shows us that those main media take apositive and praiseful attitudes towards this great international Exposition.The thesis aims to make a detailed analysis about the attitudinal meaning ofnews report on2010Shanghai World Expo. by using the framework of appraisaltheory in systemic functional linguistics, trying to provide a new theoreticalperspective to interpret the news reports and promote the development ofresearch on the news discourse in the field of foreign language studies.Meanwhile, it further validates the practicability and interpretative power ofappraisal theory, enlarges its range of applications and provides some usefulimplications for its application in the news reports.