基于评价理论的BBC政治新闻分析_英语论文

The Analysis of BBC Political News from Appraisal Theory

摘要

评价理论是二十世纪九十年代兴起的一种研究语言人际功能的理论，包括态度、介入和级差三个子系统。尽管新闻要求客观、中立，但是新闻本身就是报道者对事件所做的一种评价。本文以此为立足点，选取十五篇BBC反法西斯战争胜利的新闻报道自建语料库，对新闻中的评价资源进行量化统计。研究发现：（1）在三种不同体裁的新闻报道中，作者在表达战争胜利的情感和主张时，以态度资源为主，尤其是在幸存者的个人回忆中多用积极形容词；（2）在介入系统中，作者通过大量单声和多声介入的方式，扩大文章的对话，借他人之口来支持自己的情感，获得读者的赞同；（3）作者通过提高受害者言语的容量分级，显性的增强词语上的态度负荷来表达对二战胜利的心情和不忘历史的态度，从侧面展示出作者认为纪念活动的必要性和重要性。

关键词：评价理论；态度；介入；级差；政治新闻    

Abstract

Appraisal theory, one theory on research on interpersonal function of languages which developed in 1990s, including three subsystems: attitude, engagement and graduation, mainly studies on how authors express their subjective attitude in articles. Although required to be objective and neutral, news is a kind of comment of the reporter by itself. This paper is to select fifteen news reports on the 70th anniversary in the victory of the World Anti-fascist War to build a corpus and conduct quantitative statistics of the appraisal resources. Through the analysis of their distribution characteristics, it is found that firstly, in news reports of three different genres, they mainly focus on attitude during expression of emotions and opinions on victory of war, particularly uses many positive adjectives in memories of survivors; secondly, in engagement system, authors expand conversations via monogloss and heterogloss, and support their own emotions by mouths of others to gain readers’ agreement; thirdly, under graduation, reporters always use some sharpening words to highlight their positive attitude, while use some softening words to blur the negative attitude. Thus, in the multiple readership, reporters apply graduation to clearly show their position and attitude that it is necessary for people to commemorate the 70th anniversary in the victory of the World Anti-fascist War.

Key words: appraisal theory; attitude; engagement; graduation; political news

Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Background of the study 1

1.2 Structure of the thesis 2

2 Literature Review 2

2.1 Key terms 2

2.1.1 BBC political news 2

2.1.2 Appraisal 3

2.2 Previous studies 3

2.3 Perspective of the study 4

3 Appraisal Theory 4

3.1 Attitude 5

3.2 Engagement 6

3.3 Graduation 7

4 Analysis of BBC Political News from the Appraisal Theory 7

4.1 General comparison of appraisal resources in BBC news 7

4.2 Comparative analysis of attitude resources 10

4.2.1 Comparison of overall attitude resources distribution 10

4.2.2 Comparative analysis of affect 11

4.2.3 Comparative analysis of judgment 12

4.2.4 Comparative analysis of appreciation 13

4.3 Comparative analysis of engagement resources 13

4.3.1 Comparative analysis of monogloss 13

4.3.2 Comparative analysis of heterogloss 15

4.4 Comparative analysis of graduation resources 15

4.4.1 Comparative analysis of force 16

4.4.2 Comparative analysis of focus 16

5 Conclusion 17

5.1 Major findings 17

5.2 Limitations 18

References 19

Appendix  20