An Analysis On Attitudinal Resources Of COVID-19 Vaccines In American News Reports

Appraisal theory has aroused great attention in applied discourse ever since it was established by Martin and White(2000)in the book: The language of Evaluation:Appraisal in English in 2000.It has been employed to analyze various types of discourses among which news discourse is favored by discourse analysts due to its rich attitudinal resources and subjectivity embodied in objectivity.Considerable linguistic studies on COVID-19 in news discourse have released but few centers on COVID-19 vaccines which is still worth investigating to interpret America’s attitudes and stances towards necessity and vitality of vaccination.This thesis employs one of the subsystems,attitudinal resource system,as the theoretical foundation.It endeavors to analyze the interpersonal meaning delivered in news reports on COVID-19 vaccines from American official websites The White House to examine the attitudinal resources in light of Appraisal Theory.This study aims to probe into the following three questions:(1)What are the types of attitudinal resources on COVID-19 vaccines and their distribution in American news report?(2)What are the features of attitudinal resources on COVID-19 vaccines in American news report?(3)What are the attitudes revealed on COVID-19 vaccines in American news report?This thesis randomly selects 30 mainstream news reports(30560 words in total)from January 2021 to December 2022 concerning American COVID-19 vaccines in white house official website to conduct a comprehensive discourse analysis in light of Appraisal Theory.Since this study targets to analyze attitudes from American government,and white house official website can represent American relevant administration’s attitude for it releases governmental information and policy.This study first systematizes and categorizes the attitudinal resources in target data source to analyze the attitudes of American government towards vaccines in virtue of the research instrument UAM corpus tool 6 and then makes statistics on each type of attitudinal resources.Afterwards,this thesis analyzed the features and attitudes of attitudinal resources based on the statistics.Major findings are presented below.(1)The attitudinal resource system can be further categorized into three types of feelings,namely,Affect,Judgment and Appreciation(Martin &White,2005).The total number of attitudinal resources of this study is 1667,the majority of which is the affect resources accounting for 37.8%.The appreciation resources take up 35.6% and judgmental resources account for 26.6%.Apparently,the quantitative gap is not large among all these three attitudinal resources.(2)This thesis extends the features of attitudinal resource including polarity and explicitness proposed by Martin and White(2005)and analyzes the modality based on Halliday’s(1985)interpersonal function with regard to systematic functional linguistics.This thesis discovers that more low level value of modal auxiliaries taking up 55.8% are utilized than the other two levels which accounts for 30.7% and 13.5%respectively.First and second person pronouns accounting for 54.1% and 35%respectively are included in a larger percentage than the third person pronouns taking up 10.9%.With regard to the features of polarity and explicitness,it indicates that positive attitudinal resources account for 87.5% while negative ones takes up 10.1.In terms of explicitness,explicit attitudinal resources accounting for 79% are highly adopted than invoked ones taking up 21%.Invoked resources are realized mainly by means of lexical metaphors,non-core expressions and counter expectancy.(3)The last part is the representation of attitudes in the mainstream news reports centering COVID-19 vaccines.The hidden attitudes includes the negative emotions towards the damage caused by COVID-19 pandemic,emphasis on the necessity and importance of America’s vaccination and the praising for the contribution delivered by Biden and his administration towards global and local epidemic preventive work.The findings bring some implications and reflections for both language teaching and language learning on the Appraisal Theory.Attitudinal resources play an important role in interpersonal meaning and this study contributes to draw a comprehensive picture of attitudinal resources in news discourse.