A Comparative Analysis Of The News Reports On SARS And H7N9in China Daily From The Appraisal Theory Perspective

As the public health emergency events, SARS in2003and H7N9in2013have both brought greatpanic to the public. However, the relevant reports in China Daily hold similarities and differences in manyaspects. This thesis mainly compares and analyzes the similarities and differences of SARS and H7N9news reports in China Daily from the aspect of appraisal theory.The thesis attempts to analyze the transformations of H7N9news reports through comparing thedistribution of the linguistic resources of its extracted texts with SARS news reports, aiming at finding thesimilarities and differences of SARS and H7N9news reports in China Daily in the language expressionduring the decade，analyzing the language attributions of the public health emergency events and discussingthe interpersonal meanings hidden in the news reports through the language expression. The thesis isexpected to provide some suggestions for the news reports readers and English news lovers to betterunderstand such texts.At first,20news reports about SARS and H7N9avian flu respectively are extracted from ChinaDaily. After that, the40extracted news reports are annotated based on the UAM CorpusTool2.8to countand compare their linguistic resources distribution from attitude, engagement and graduation aspectsrespectively under the appraisal theory. Through the analysis of the similarities and differences of thelinguistic resources distribution in the extracted SARS and H7N9news reports in China Daily, thelanguage expression of the public health emergency events during the decade was analyzed and then theinterpersonal meanings hidden in the news reports were further discussed.Therefore, after analyzing the linguistic resources distribution, it was found that in general the threesubsystems in the appraisal type hold a nearly equal proportion in the extracted news reports in China Daily,in which almost a half resources are belonging to the attitude type,1/5engagement resources and1/3graduation resources. That is, the reporting tone, methods，reporting emphasis and strategies towards thepublic health emergency news reports are sharing a similar mode.However, there indeed exist several linguistic resources distribution differences in the affect typebelonging to the attitude type and the engagement type. Firstly, with regard to the affect resourcedistribution, in the H7N9news reports, the (un)happiness type accounts for14.13%, the (in)security type 49.91%and the (dis)satisfaction type36.95%, while accordingly in the SARS news reports, the resourcedistributions are1.14%,28.57%and70.29%. Secondly, in terms of the resource distribution in theengagement type, in the H7N9news reports, the monogloss resources held20.04%in the total extracted20H7N9news reports with another79.96%distribution belonging to the heterogloss type. By contrast, theaccording number was35.45%in SARS news reports with only64.55%heterogloss resources.In addition, compared with the SARS news reports, much more information about the epidemicsituation, the government transparency improvement, the impact on the various industries from the H7N9flu and the epidemic prevention and control lessons learned from SARS emerged in the H7N9news reports.That is, there existed more and more news reports with rich-covered and deeper-digesting contents towardsthe public health emergency events. On the one hand, the media reported the epidemic in a timely andobjective way with more and more openness and transparency; on the other hand, citizens’ right to beacknowledged the epidemic timely was being strengthened.