A Study Of Attitudinal Resources In Chinese, British And American News Reports On Ya’an Earthquake

Language,as a carrier of information,performs various functions simultaneously.Many linguistic scholars,such as Halliday(1994)and Martin(2000),have focused their studies on functions of language.Among them,Halliday has developed Systemic Functional Grammar,advocating that language performs three meta-functions concurrently.However,noticing drawbacks of Halliday’s theory of meta-functions,Martin and his colleagues have proposed Appraisal Theory(AT),as an extension and supplement.Appraisal Theory,centering on how speakers/writers express their affections,attitudes and judgments towards entities and subjects presented to them and other participants involved,has been popularly applied in discourse analysis to investigate the evaluative resources and the subjective stance of the writers or speakers.This thesis then illustrates the distribution patterns of attitudinal resources in three news reports of Ya’an earthquake in 2013 from China Daily,New York Times and the Guardian respectively.In terms of research methods,discourse analysis and introspection are mainly used to answer the following three questions:1)What are the distribution patterns of attitudinal resources in China Daily,New York Times and the Guardian in reporting Ya’an earthquake?2)What are noticeable differences in stances and attitudes of the three media agencies in reporting Ya’an earthquake?3)What are the effects of social and cultural context on these differences in perspectives?This thesis draws the following three findings.Firstly,in China Daily,there are more positive attitudinal resources and only one Affect resource is involved.In New York Times,there are more attitudinal resources,especially positive ones have an advantage in number over negative ones.Besides,judgmental resources have occupied a major position in it.Furthermore,in the Guardian,there are more negative attitudinal resources and Appreciation resources account for a small proportion.Secondly,the three media agencies’ perspectives in reporting about the same issue can be different.They try to be objective in reporting the fact.Nevertheless,their news reports are subjective in nature.First of all,in reporting Ya’an earthquake,there are more attitudinal resources in New York Times than China Daily,and the Guardian,especially judgmental resources.Besides,there are basically more positive attitudinal resources in all of the three media agencies in reporting the disaster.Moreover,there are more implicit attitudinal resources in China Daily,especially in judgmental resources.Thirdly,it has been proved that there is an interrelated relationship between the perspective of an agency and its social cultural context,which means that the different value and aim of media agencies given by the social cultural context have affected the reporting focus of these media agencies.Firstly,it can be drawn that the profit-making nature of America and British news agencies explains partly why there are more attitudinal resources,especially judgmental one in New York Times and the Guardian.Secondly,the dominant culture in China(Confucunism)and America(Christianity)account for the reason why there are more judgmental resources in New York Times.