| In modern society, news has already pervaded every aspect of the human life. With the rapid growth of global economy, economic news, as a subcategory of news discourse, plays a more and more important role in our daily life. Especially the economic news that encompasses comments of a journalist or a news agency can unconsciously influence the viewpoints or attitudes of the newspaper readers towards a specific economic relation, a specific economic activity or a specific economic phenomenon. So as a matter of fact there is a growing need for the newspaper readers to reprocess in their mind the economic news that is presented in a newspaper to get an in-depth understanding of their own.Australian linguist and the representative of Sydney school, James Martin has long been engaged in making researches on Systemic Functional Linguistics with his master Halliday, at the same time he also has great interest in discourse analysis and has tried to combine them together. Based on the result of the project which takes the language competence of students at New South Wales school in Australia as the research object, Martin and other scholars, including Peter White, have summarized Appraisal System. The publication of The Language of Evaluation:Appraisal in English in2005marks the real establishment of Appraisal Theory. Appraisal Theory is a new theory which develops from Systemic Functional Linguistics and involves the studies of the realization of interpersonal meaning of language. It is a system which deals with evaluation in discourse, and it has transferred the focus of interpersonal analysis of discourse from grammar level to lexical level. Many scholars have applied Appraisal Theory in discourse analysis including commercial advertising discourse, historical discourse, literature discourse and news discourse and so on. Among the analysis of news discourse, the appraisal analysis of economic news discourse is rarely seen, so this thesis tries to make a research by analyzing the subjective tendency in English economic news from the perspective of Appraisal Theory. On the basis of the framework of Appraisal Theory, this thesis tries to analyze two pieces of economic news chosen from Wall Street Journal. The two pieces of news that are chosen as samples are about the downgrade of U.S.’s government bond credit rating from AAA to AA+that is announced by the world-famous credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s on August5th,2011. Through analysis, it is clearly seen that almost every appraisal resources can be traced in these two news samples, and judgment and appreciation of attitude resources and judgment resources are frequently employed. While as gradability is also a property of attitude and engagement resources, graduation resources usually respectively overlap with attitude or engagement resources in the two samples. As is seen in the analysis of the appraisal resources, it shows that: first of all, the writers of the two. samples tend to weaken the bad impacts brought about by the downgrade event. Secondly, the two writers have the intention to blame China on its overreaction towards the downgrade event.The aim of the thesis is, by finding out the appraisal resources applied in the two pieces of economic news, to dig out the subjective tendency of the writers by means of the theoretical framework of Appraisal Theory. The study attempts to help newspaper readers realize that it is necessary for them to clear the air and see a whole picture of an economic event, and finally get an in-depth understanding of their own. |
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