A Comparative Study Of Engagement Resources In Chinese And American English Editorials

As a kind of news comment, the editorial has been taken as the core and soul of thenewspaper which is used to timely comment on important events or problems happening bothat home and abroad on behalf of the editorial department or newspaper aiming to show thenewspaper or media’s attitude and stances, to guide the public opinion, to persuade the readersand thus to appeal audience to take measures. Belonging to the news genre, the editorial isthereby mostly cited as studies on the journalism discourse. However, the researches oneditorials from the perspective of linguistics are not conducted until1990s, most of which arecentered on the stylistic or structural features of editorials and few of these studies are focusedon Appraisal Theory. In the mean time, scholars also have made few attempts to developcomparative analysis between English and English. Therefore, this thesis attempts to conducta comparative study on the editorials of Chinese and American English by means ofEngagement resources.In order to compare the engagement resources distributed in editorials of Chinese andAmerican English, the author in all chooses70editorials concerning international politics,39of which are Chinese English editorials from the official website of China Daily with totalwords of20754and31of which are American English editorials from the official website ofWashington post with total words of21098. With the Engagement framework proposed byMartin and White, the author conducts both qualitative and quantitative analysis under thehelp of UAM Corpus Tool V2.8.12aiming to summarize the distribution and frequency ofeach type of Engagement resource in the two corpora. Meanwhile, the similarities anddifferences between the two target texts are described. And the reasons for similarities anddifferences are also found.After a thorough analysis with both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the studyfinds that there exist both similarities and differences in the usage of Engagement in the twocorpora. Similarities are mainly listed as follows:1. Within Contract type, both kinds of targettexts are prone to use more Disclaim values than Proclaim values;2. In Disclaim sub-type,both Chinese English and American English corpora prefer Counter values to Deny values;3. Within proclaim sub-type, the two target texts have similar high frequencies in pronouncevalues;4. In the type of Expand, the favored values are Modality and Acknowledge in bothkinds of editorials. Whereas disparities in cultural values and stances towards the internationalevents also contribute to such differences as well:1. In the Chinese English corpus, theContract resources are favored over Expand ones, while in American English corpus, Expandvalues are inclined to be preferred over Contract ones;2Within the Expand type, there existsignificant differences on the usage of Acknowledge;3. In Contract type, although Endorsevalues cover a small proposition among all the Engagement resources, significant differencesare indeed existent between the two corpora.This present study conducts a comparative analysis on the Engagement resources in theChinese and American English editorials from the perspective of Appraisal Theory with aview to contributing to the application of Appraisal Theory in the editorial discourse andtherefore providing new angles for comparative studies on editorials. Furthermore, it is hopedthat this comparative study can bring new light to the EFL teaching, especially to thenewspaper reading.