| Now in the age of information, news from all over the world congests our life everyday. They have changing our society and activities no matter the news are happy or sad. Among these news reports, disaster news report has been paid more attention. In the interpretation of these reports we find that there exits great differences of the focus in Western and Chinese media when they face the same disaster. As we all know, the main theme of disaster news report is always related to negative information like suffering and dilemma. But from the view of dialectics we can know that everything has two sides: positive side and negative side, so we should also have our concern on the positive side in disaster news report. Therefore, it is necessary for us to analyze the event of the disaster as well as the positive meaning when we study and understand disaster news report. The research on disaster news report started in 1960 s, and it is analyzed mainly from the perspective of stylistics, critical discourse analysis and social-cultural study. In the previous studies, scholars seldom studied disaster news report from the perspective of PDA. So in this paper, the author tries to make a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese disaster news reports from the perspective of PDA so as to discover the positive meaning expressed by the two kinds of discourses and expose the differences of them. Finally, this paper will discuss the differences of thinking model, the differences in the criteria of judging news value and the differences in cultural view between people in Western countries and China.This paper aims to make a contrastive analysis of the different focuses in English and Chinese disaster news reports within the framework of appraisal theory from a new perspective to discourse analysis – PDA. PDA tries to unscramble discourse with positive attitude and promote the positive reform and put forward the solution in peaceful way. It tends to handle various social contradictions and some inequalities with a more positive attitude so that to establish a harmonious society through discourse analysis. The appraisal theory is the further development of systematic functional linguistics, which is proposed by linguist J.R. Martin(1990) on the basis of the study of interpersonal meaning of M.A.K Halliday(1980). Appraisal theory is the system of evaluating language resources which describe and illustrate viewpoint, attitude and position of language users. It can be divided into three sub-systems called attitude, engagement and graduation. Disaster news reports such as Wenchuan Earthquake, Haiti Earthquake, Chile Earthquake and Malaysia’s Airline Accident are selected from western media New York Times, the Guardian, Washington Post and Chinese media China Daily, Liberation Daily and Guangming Daily as the corpus to make a contrastive analysis. First the classification of the appraisal resources in the disaster news reports are made, then descriptive analysis about the different distribution of appraisal resources of English and Chinese discourses are put forward, and at last, the primary cause of the differences are discussed. This paper tends to answer the following three questions:1) Whether the percentages of the positive items used in the disaster news reports in order to express the positive meaning are the same between Chinese and English media?2) If they are not the same, what are the differences?3) What are the reasons that lead to the differences?The main findings are that there exits differences of the percentages of the positive items used in English and Chinese disaster news reports.It is mainly expressed on that in English disaster news report is that it is likely to use more negative items in appraisal system.Western media would like to expose the negative and tragic factors and exhibit the details of the disaster so that they can arouse the curiosity of the public and stimulate the feeling of the reader,such as words:“terrible”,“devastating”,“deadly”,“fearful”and so on,however,in Chinese disaster news report it uses more positive appraisal items,such as words:“积极的”,“有效”,“有利于”,“迎难而上”and so on,it appreciates the lofty spirit and great power of people reflected in the disaster events.There are many reasons for the above differences,and in this paper,it will show us a detailed explanation from the following four reasons:nature of media,thinking model,criteria of judging news value and cultural view.This paper has certain theoretical and practical significance. In theory, this paper has expanded the analyzing field of appraisal theory in the analysis of news report which will be helpful for the further development and improvement of the theory. In practice, quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are applied to make the contrastive analysis of English and Chinese disaster news reports from the perspective of PDA, and it helps to expand the research perspective of PDA and provides a new direction of the further development of PDA. In addition, this study could provide a reference for the reader to do better in parsing and writing disaster news reports. |
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