| The Appraisal Theory is a new development of Systemic Functional Linguistics,mainly composed of attitude,engagement and graduation.It aims to explore the interpersonal meaning of oral or written discourse.Through exploring the choice of words,the author's attitude orientation can be revealed.Peter White has firstly applied it to the study of news discourses.This paper tries to apply the Appraisal Theory to analyze 2016 American election news discourses,selecting the 30 articles as corpus from the three print medias,i.e.,the New York Times,Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.Through analysis and discussion,this paper finds that in the attitude system,the frequency of positive evaluation is higher than that of negative evaluation,which reflects the evaluation tone is positive.And the frequency of appreciation resources is higher than that of affect and judgement,which reflects that more appreciation resources are adopted to make positive comments on Trump's personal image and his policies.In the heterogloss resources of engagement system,the proportion of the dialogical expansion is more than that of dialogical contraction,which shows the authors adopt different opinion sources to express their views.In the graduation system,the use of the force is more than that of focus,which is used to strengthen or sharpen the authors' attitude and viewpoints.In conclusion,from perspective of the Appraisal Theory,the analysis of the 2016 American election news discourses can enrich the application of the Appraisal Theory. |
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