Positive Discourse Analysis Of The G20 Summit News Reports From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The research on Discourse Analysis has been conducted for many years,and mainly from the perspective of CDA.With the appearance of the limitations of CDA research,PDA as a new perspective of DA has been put forward by Martin(2004).PDA advocates realizing positive reform and coping with issues peacefully instead of analyzing radically the power distribution and ideology hidden in discourses like CDA.The aim of PDA is to establish‘Peace Linguistics' and eventually to build a harmonious and peaceful human society.Appraisal Theory is a new development and extension of interpersonal meaning within SFL,proposed by Martin and White(2005),and they assume that it is not enough to conduct language research in terms of function and structure,and attention should be paid to the evaluative meaning given by the writers or speakers endowed with language.Therefore,Appraisal Theory is committed to building up a theoretical framework for conducting research on all kinds of evaluative language in discourses or texts.Appraisal Theory is a new method for studying interpersonal meaning based on SFL,and it mainly describes and interprets the writers or speakers' stances,attitudes,and opinions by analyzing the appraisal resources distributed in discourses or texts.It is known that the Eleventh G20 Summit is held in Hangzhou city,China on September 4 to 5,2016.China Daily is the national English newspaper in China,and the fruits of this summit and the significant role the G20 members played in promoting global growth have been reported in China Daily.This thesis employs the Appraisal Theory as the theoretical framework,and collects and selects 30 news reports of the G20 Summit as corpus to explore how these appraisal resources are employed to realize the positive interpersonal meaning.These appraisal resources are composed of attitude,engagement and graduation.Byconducting research on the G20 Summit news reports,the author finds that these appraisal resources are distributed unevenly.In attitude resources,the affect and appreciation resources occupy the majority and most of these attitude resources adopted in the G20 Summit news reports are positive.In engagement resources,the writers or speakers are inclined to adopt entertain and acknowledge,and deny resources,and in graduation resources,the writers or speakers adopt more force resources than focus resources.From the perspective of PDA,these attitude resources are applied to increase the confidence of the worldwide people in global growth and mutual development,to strengthen mutual cooperation,to establish harmonious economic relationships,and to transmit positive energy.These graduation resources are adopted to emphasize the emotional agreement and the achievement China and the G20 members have attained.These engagement resources are adopted to expand dialogic space,and strengthen the confidence in realizing mutual development and global growth.This thesis conducts PDA research on the G20 Summit news reports from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.Hence,this thesis is a complement to the current research on PDA and Appraisal Theory.Meanwhile,there are some implications and suggestions to the later researches on PDA.Practically,this study has much enlightenment to the learners regarding English as the second language,to news reporters and to the translators.