| Systemic Functional Grammar, proposed by Halliday, involves interpersonal meanings and has great significance and influence on the studies and researches on interpersonal meanings. On the basis of SFL(Systemic Functional Linguistics), J. R. Martin and his colleagues put forward Appraisal Theory which makes up for the deficiency that SFL merely explores interpersonal function from mood and modality, providing a brand new perspective for the study of interpersonal meaning. Appraisal Theory has three sub-systems: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, and mainly concerns all sorts of negotiable attitudes in discourses, the intensity of emotion and the ways to align readers. Engagement system, through which speakers or writers can adjust responsibility for the discourse, refers to a series of lexio-grammatical resources which indicate whether the speakers or writers tend to negotiate with different instances or alternative voices.Nowadays, political events attract people’s attention, so does political news, a news type which conveys and delivers the information of the latest political event. News discourse is usually considered to be objective and impartial, while as a matter of fact in their reports reporters tend to adopt different ways to adjust responsibility for other voices and positions. Therefore, engagement resources are frequently employed by reporters in political news. Researches on engagement resources in political news and the realization of interpersonal meaning are limited. Based on the Engagement system, the thesis studies the engagement resources in English political news to explore the distribution and frequency of these resources and to explain how the engagement resources are employed by reporters to realize the interpersonal meaning.For the current study, 35 latest news texts, whose total words amount to 43,149, are drawn from the websites of Washington Post, all of which belong to the category of political news. With the help of the UAM Corpus Tool, qualitative research method is adopted to make a detailed analysis. The study found that all kinds of engagement resources are employed by news reporters, but with uneven frequency. Dialogic expansion resources, representing 55.36% in the whole system, outnumber dialogic contraction resources, accounting for 44.64%. Within dialogic expansion resources, the frequency of Attribute resources is higher than that of Entertain resources, representing 36.82% and 18.55% respectively. As for Attribute resources, compared with Distance resources, reporters prefer to employ more Acknowledge resources. Within dialogic contraction resources, Disclaim, amounting to 41.38% in the whole system far exceeds Proclaim representing only 3.25%. The frequency of Deny resources is slightly higher than that of Counter resources, accounting for 22.42% and 18.96% respectively. Within Proclaim, Endorse resources are the most frequently used. The realization of interpersonal function of English political news is mainly achieved by dialogic expansion and dialogic contraction. Dialogic expansion resources help aligning putative readers by tolerating alternative positions and dialogic contraction resources help to realize the alignment by challenging to alternative positions. |
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