An Analysis Of Engagement Resources In English Editorials About Chinese Important Events

Editorial, as an important news discourse, attracts more and more attention. Its main purpose is to analyze news event, express opinions, indoctrinate the public with their viewpoint,(Guo Ke,1992) so as to achieve the purpose of influencing and persuading the readers. Editorial is concerned with the subjective evaluation and stances to a certain event or problem and reflects the process of interaction and negotiation among different voices or instances. Therefore, in my opinion, editorial is worth researching.Appraisal Theory is a comprehensive breakthrough of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistic. Appraisal Theory is concerned with the attitudes that are negotiated in the text, the strength of the feeling involved and the ways in which values are sourced and readers are aligned(Martin&Rose,2003:22). Appraisal theory includes three subsystems:attitude, engagement and graduation, under which, subcategories are defined. Engagement stresses the negotiation of heterogloss. Based on the framework of appraisal theory, the thesis aims to investigate the frequencies of engagement resources in English editorials and how the engagement resources realize the interpersonal meaning.25 editorials are collected from New York Times as data of the thesis. With the help of UAM Corpus Tool, both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis methods are adopted.Quantitative analysis is applied to make a statistical analysis to explore the frequencies of all engagement resources in editorials. Qualitative analysis is mainly on how editors interact with readers and realize the interpersonal meaning by using engagement resources.On the basis of analysis, the conclusions are presented as followed: All engagement resources are widely used in English editorials; The frequencies of engagement resources are different. In total, expansion resources are more preferable than contraction resources.Disclaim ranks first and proclaim is hardly used, which is compatible with the features and purposes of editorial; Editorial writers can interact with putative readers and realize interpersonal meaning with expansion resources opening up dialogic space or contraction narrowing down dialogic space.This thesis applies appraisal theory to English editorials, which serves to understand and interpret English editorials well and grasp the intention of editorials for readers and provides a reliable way for English learners to produce good persuasive writings. Besides, it is expected that the thesis can provide help for the further study.