| Before the referendum day on June 23rd 2016 BST?British Summer Time?,the referendum of Brexit in UK has drawn extensive attention from many people in Britain and beyond.Especially in UK,both remain camp and leave camp have published lots of news reports to analyze the possible advantages and disadvantages about Brexit through many news media to win more votes on their own sides.In the meantime,some related news media in EU also expressed their opinions about Brexit.This thesis would choose some different news reports about Brexit from different parties to make contrastive analysis under Appraisal Theory with an attempt to discuss the different attitudes towards Brexit from various news agencies,the stance of main political figures towards Brexit and the main disputes among different parties.Appraisal Theory is used very frequently and broadly in various kinds of discourse analysis.It is put forward by Australian linguist J.R.Martin.The Appraisal Theory includes three subsystems:attitude,graduation and engagement.The Appraisal Theory mainly discusses how speakers and writers evaluate things,express attitudes and realize other interpersonal functions.With qualitative and quantitative analysis,this thesis aims to make an empirical study on the distribution of appraisal resources in English news reports about Brexit.The thesis selects 41 English news reports about Brexit,of which 26 articles are from Politico.eu,8680 words together;7 articles are from The Telegraph,8967 words;and 8 articles are from The Guardian,8470 words together.At the same time,the linguistic tool UAM Corpus Tool 2.8.17 is used to make annotations,categories,accounting and analysis for all statistics in all news reports.The results shows,first of all,engagement represents the largest resource in both Politico.eu and The Guardian under appraisal theory,showing that these two news media prefer to use more quotations than another does.Also,the distribution of attribute under engagement in Politico.eu is larger than that of in both The Telegraph and The Guardian,illustrating that Politico.eu uses most distribution of quotations.As Politico.eu is not a local British news agency,it uses more quotations to express its attitude.Secondly,among the three news media,the percent of graduation is the largest in The Guardian compared with that of in Politico.eu and The Telegraph,which could also be shown from the distribution of quantification of force under graduation.The reason is that these two news agencies tend to use many figures released from official authorities like IMF and Bank of England,which often describe the negative influence on UK by Brexit.Thirdly,among the three news media,attitude accounts for the number one distribution under the general appraisal resource in The Telegraph.Therefore,The Telegraph may seem to be more subjective than other two newspapers.Under attitude,the distribution of negative appreciation under attitude is most frequently used in The Guardian and The Telegraph,followed by Politico.eu.Most distribution of negative appreciation under attitude is used to warn public about the possible negative consequences which would be caused by Brexit in UK.Before the referendum of Brexit in UK,different parties hold different attitudes towards Brexit.Based on the statistic collection and analysis of attribute under engagement,different news media would quote the speeches of different political figures and authorities in the news reports in order to make these renowned political figures and authorities attract more votes.Meanwhile,in terms of the distribution of graduation,some major disputes have been discussed about the influence on various fields in Britain caused by Brexit in the news reports in the three news media.The three news media all reckon that the business and trade sector in Britain would be hit severely by Brexit.However,different opinions about the negative or positive impact on many fields in Britain by Brexit have been made from these three news media. |
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