Implicit Evaluation Meaning And Its Expressive Means In News Discourse

Previously,the focus of research on evaluative meaning was mainly on the explicitly evaluative meaning,but in recent years,it has shifted to implicitly evaluative meaning.Although news discourse emphasizes fairness and objectivity,it actually conveys the author’s ideology and value position,so it implies rich evaluative meaning.Taking P.R.R.White’s implicitly evaluative mechanism as the theoretical framework,this thesis selects 214 news reports about disturbance by changing extradition bill of Hong Kong from the New York Times and discusses which implicitly evaluative strategies the news writers use to express the evaluative meaning,and summarizes the corresponding means of expression.The findings are as follows:(1)News writers indirectly express their negative evaluations of the Chinese authorities and police by using four implicitly evaluative strategies: evocation,provocation,association and attribution and its information sources.(2)Enriching the implicitly evaluative mechanism of P.R.R.White: Contrast is a feasible means of evocation,information source is an effective means of attribution.(3)In terms of evocation,news writers selectively list the facts favorable to the protesters,and arrange the police as positive “agent” and the protesters as innocent “affectedness”,so as to secretly express the negative evaluative meaning of the police;In terms of provocation,the news writers further strengthen the negative evaluation of Chinese officials and police through metaphor,counter-expectation,intensification and contrast;In terms of association,news writers choose words that seem neutral but actually have positive evaluative meaning to praise the protesters.On attribution and its information sources,news writers indirectly support the information provided by the protesters.Disagreeing with information from the police and using authoritative evidence in their defence.News writers use relatively more anonymous information sources to express their own views through external information sources.From the macro level,news writers indirectly express the negative evaluation through the discourse prosody,the radiation of explicit evaluation and the cultural context.The operation of the implicit evaluation mechanism is reflected in the rational use of the above four implicit evaluation strategies.The premise of the application of the evaluation strategy is the refinement and reserve of evaluation expression means.Therefore,on the basis of theoretical exploration and corpus analysis,this thesis focuses on the discovery and conciseness of implicit evaluation expressions,aiming to make the audience know how the implicitly evaluative meaning is expressed in the news discourse,so as to maintain an objective and correct position.