| Appraisal theory is the new exploration and development of interpersonal meaning of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It develops out of Tenor Theory and focuses on the study of semantics of discourse. Appraisal theory is concerned with various language resources by which speakers/writers can convey opinions, adopt stances, make judgments and ultimately realize negotiation and alignment with listeners/readers. Appraisal system consists of three subsystems: attitude, graduation and engagement. Engagement system negotiates the interaction between diverse viewpoints and positions.As one of the most important forms of news comments, editorials occupy a dominate position in newspapers and they are honored as the wind vane of the media. They are articles which are specifically designed to spread the ideas and stances for the news agencies, persuade readers and influence public opinion. Plenty of studies have been made on the structure features or rhetorical characteristics of English editorial discourse while exploration of engagement resources of this kind discourse is relatively limited. Therefore, under the guidance of engagement system, this thesis seeks to probe into the characteristics of engagement resources in English editorial discourse and discover the distribution features of these resources in the introduction, body and conclusion parts of English editorials. What’s more, this thesis attempts to figure out how editorial writers employ various engagement resources to negotiate with potential readers and achieve their writing purposes.40 English editorials are used as the corpus in this thesis and they are chosen from two authoritative newspapers: The Washington Post and The Guardian. Besides, quantitative and qualitative research methods are both adopted to conduct data analysis. The statistic analysis indicates engagement resources are widely employed in English editorial discourse. Entertain(31.9%) and disclaim(24.4%) are the most favored engagement resources while other resources are less used. In addition, engagement values in different parts of English editorials present different distribution features. In fact, how engagement values distribute in English editorials is subject to the genre of editorial discourse.This thesis applies appraisal theory to study the features of engagement resources of English editorials and provides a appraisal theoretical perspective for further exploration of interpersonal meaning. At the same time, this study provides insights into the investigation of engagement values in other discourses. Furthermore, this thesis offers instructions for English reading and writing. |
