A Contrastive Study Of Stance-taking In Covering Apple Warranty Issues Between American And Chinese News Reports: An Engagement Perspective

News reporting normally reflects the ideology of a country, government, orsociety. However, it has to appear objective and unbiased to people. Hard news isjust the representative of concealing reporters’ stance-taking. The thesis aims toexpose the hidden stance-taking of news media by discovering the reporter voicebehind news reports. The previous scholars have applied Appraisal Theory toanalyze news texts. Most of them have utilized its sub-system of Attitude, but fewhave adopted its sub-system of Engagement. Because Engagement is conducive torevealing the heteroglossic dialogism of discourses, the thesis adopts it to acontrastive study of stance-taking between Chinese and American news reportscovering the Apple warranty issues in China. The research does the study mainly onqualitative approach, and is supported by quantitative approach. By comparing thedistances between reporter voice and reportee voice, the study finds that Chinese andAmerican news media conceal different stances in the concerned news reports.And the thesis proves the hypothesis that the three components of ReportingSpeech (speech modes, news sources, and reporting verbs) engage in reporters’stance-taking in news reporting and that context influences the engagement ofspeech modes and reporting verbs.The current thesis draws the following major findings:First, in the respect of speech modes, the degree of engagement becomesstronger along the cline of direct speech-direct discourse slipping/preset directdiscourse-“so-called” speech-indirect speech, and the distance between reportervoice and reportee voice is contracted to a larger degree, and vice verse.Second, in terms of news sources, the appearance and ways of appearance of news source represent the selection of reporters’ stance-taking.Third, in light of reporting verbs, the selection of reporting verbs indicates thereporters’ attitude toward the reportee voice.Fourth, as to the analysis of the same adoption of speech mode or of reportingverbs in the two countries’ news media news reporting texts covering the same topics,context may be taken into consideration.The significance of the research is as follows: first, it is in hopes of developingthe application of Engagement to revealing the heteroglossic dialogism in discourse;second, it intends to seek a way to expose covert stances in hard news from theperspective of linguistics.