A Contrastive Study Of Positive Discourse In Sports News Based On Appraisal Theory

As a product of the interaction between ideology and political power,news discourse analysis can not only convey information and guide public opinions,but also reflect different cultural backgrounds and ideologies.It has been one of the hot spots of discourse analysis.At present,the study of discourse analysis is developed from critical discourse analysis to positive discourse analysis,which provides a new perspective for discourse analysis.Positive discourse analysis is mainly used to analyze “good news”,such as speech,news reports,etc.There are more studies on economic and political news,while less studies on sports news.Therefore,this thesis selected 20 Rio Olympics news reports from The New York Times(NYT)and People’s Daily(PD)(English version)as corpus and aims to conduct a contrastive analysis of the 2016 Rio Olympics-related news reports,so as to expand the scope of the study of positive discourse analysis.At present,the main theory applied to positive discourse analysis is James.R.Martin’s appraisal theory.Martin made a detailed study of appraisal system and divided it into three major sub-systems: attitude,engagement and graduation.Based on appraisal theory,this research,adopting the quantitative method and qualitative method,makes a contrastive analysis of the distribution of the appraisal resources in the news reports of Rio Olympic Games.The study has shown that similarities and differences are both existed between NYT and PD.As for the similarities,both of the two newspapers employ abundant appraisal resources.In the three subsystems,engagement resources occupy the largest proportion,attitude resources occupy the least percentage and graduation resources locate in the middle of the two resources in both of PD and NYT sports news of Rio Olympics.Both of them maintain the objectivity of the reports.As for the differences,news reports in NYT employ more appraisal resources than those in PD.In the three subsystems,engagement resources occupy a higher proportion in NYT,while attitude and graduation resources occupy a higher proportion in PD.In the attitude system,PD uses more affect resources than NYT,while NYT employs more judgment resources and appreciation resources.In the system of engagement,PD uses more dialogical contraction to narrow down other possibilities of views to make the comment seem more authoritative.While NYT employs more dialogic expansion and quotes more external voices to express their own viewpoints.In the graduation system,PD uses more quantifications to graduate appraisal resources,while NYT uses more intensifications.Through contrastive analysis,this study reveals the similarities and differences between the selected samples of PD and NYT.It enriches the study scope of positive discourse analysis.Meanwhile,the study is helpful to improve readers’ awareness in news reading and for readers to better understand the attitudes,opinions and standpoints contained in the news.