A Comparative Analysis Of Engagement Resources Between Chinese And British News Reports On Trump's Travel Ban

The study of the ideological meaning in news discourse is an important research field of linguistics.Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA)aims to reveal the relationship between language,power and ideology by examining language and discourse.Appraisal Theory mainly focuses on the interpersonal meaning of language and discourse,which can be used as a powerful tool for CDA.This study will conduct a comparative study of the Travel Ban in Chinese and British news reports from the perspective of engagement system,which is the subsystem of Appraisal Theory,in order to reveal the ideological position of the two countries on the ban.The Appraisal Theory is developed by J.R.Martin and P.R.White(2005)based on one of the three metafunctions of Systemic Functional Linguistics--interpersonal metafunction.It extends the study of interpersonal meaning to discourse semantic level and improve the applicability of Systemic Functional Linguistics.The Appraisal Theory focuses on the various attitudes in the discourse that interact and negotiate,the intensity of the emotions and the ways in which values and alliance readers are shown.It includes three subsystems: Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.Among them,the engagement system is to persuade through different sources or to reserve space for negotiation.The study analyzes the ideological standpoint implied in Chinese and British news reports based on the realization and distribution of engagement resources.This study chooses the news reports since the American president Trump announced the Travel Ban.The author respectively selects 33 articles from the China's authoritative newspaper,China Daily,on Trump's Travel Ban and 30 articles from British mainstream media BBC on Trumps Travel Ban.This study uses the linguistic statistical software UAM Corpus Tool to help analyze the articles.The study has drawn three findings.Firstly,in terms of realization of engagement resources,both media employ abundant engagement resources.To deliver different ideological standpoints,the employment of the engagementresources in both media shows difference.The way of realization of the engagement resources is demonstrated.Secondly,in terms of distribution of engagement resources,in Chinese news reports,the distribution of each engagement resource shows as follows: deny(12.93%),counter(4.74%),concur(2.59%),pronounce(2.59%),endorse(1.72%),entertain(21.12%),acknowledge(47.84%)and distance(6.47%)and in British news reports,the distribution of each engagement resource is as follows: deny(21.97%),counter(5.68%),concur(3.41%),pronounce(3.79%),endorse(1.89%),entertain(15.91%),acknowledge(40.15%)and distance(7.20%).Thirdly,in terms of value position,the study finds that the Chinese media tend to believe that the policy has anti-Muslim countries tendency and the British media tend to negatively report on the policy from the perspective of violation of human rights.The British media also doubt the reliability of the policy in favor of U.S.security.This study uses the Appraisal Theory to compare the political news reports of the mainstream media of China and Britain and reveals the positions which are conveyed by the mainstream media in China and Britain and the realization of their interpersonal meaning,which will help to provide a new perspective for the study of news discourse.At the same time,it helps readers read and comprehend the political news discourse critically,and further verifies the powerful explanatory power of the Appraisal Theory in discourse analysis.