| English sports news in newspapers has received worldwide attention from many scholars in recent years. A great number of researches on English sports news have been conducted from different perspectives, such as stylistics, discourse analysis, translation and the like. However, according to the author?s investigation, little attention is paid to the analysis of English sports news from the perspective of Appraisal Theory, not to mention the contrastive study on appraisal resources in English sports news written by Chinese writers and American writers.The 2014 Sochi Olympic Games is the largest winter sports spectacle ever undertaken in terms of the scale and the number of athletes. During the period of Sochi Olympic Games, both Chinese and Western media have given detailed sports reporting which is full of assessments and judgments on athletes, teams, coaches or judges. Therefore, this thesis attempts to conduct a contrastive study on JUDGMENT resources in Sochi Olympic English news written by Chinese journalists and American journalists within the framework of Appraisal Theory.The author meticulously selects 78 pieces of straight news relevant to Sochi Olympic Games, including 40 pieces from China Daily and 38 pieces from Washington Post with 24470 and 24419 words respectively, and then carries out a thorough quantitative research on these samples from four aspects which include JUDGMENT type, position, source and mode with the help of UAM Corpus Tool 2.8.12, with the purpose of finding out the differences in the tendency of using JUDGMENT in terms of the number of these linguistic resources in English sports news written by Chinese journalists and American journalists. The major findings are summarized as below.As for the comparison of JUDMGNET type between the two corpora, there are significant differences. Chinese sportswriters tend to use more linguistic resources for Social Esteem, especially the JUDGMENT of Tenacity. While the number of Social Sanction value is a little higher in American corpus than in Chinese one. Besides, there also exist certain similarities. It is found that Social Esteem outweighs Social Sanction in both of the two corpora, with Capacity taking up the largest proportion, followed by Tenacity, Normality, Propriety and Veracity.With regarding to the comparison of JUDGMENT position, there is no significant difference between the two datasets. Positive JUDGMENT plays a dominant role in all of the English sports news.As for the comparison of JUDGMENT source, significant differences are found between the two corpora. Non-authorial JUDGMENT is adopted more frequently than authorial JUDGMENT by Chinese writers, while American writers tend to express authorial attitude directly rather than non-authorial one.In the comparison of JUDGMENT mode, inscribed JUDGMENT is more often used than invoked one in both the two kinds of English sports news. However, contrasted with Chinese sports news in which the majority of the inscribed JUDGMENT are non-authorial attitude, the most part of JUDGMENT is explicitly delivered by writers themselves in American sports news.Theoretically, the current study provides a new perspective in exploring English sports news and proves the feasibility of Appraisal system which turns out a useful tool for analyzing attitudinal resources in such discourse. Practically speaking, it assists readers in better understanding JUDGMENT resources in English sports news. Additionally, it benefits us in deeply comprehending the differences between Chinese and American sports news, which in turn deepens our understanding of different cultural values behind mass media. |
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