中美索契冬奥会新闻报道判断资源比较研究

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION

1. 1 Research Background
With the popularity of sports activities, sports news is becoming a hot-debated topic andindispensable part in our daily life. English sports news, as a subgenre of news reports, aimsto transmit real-time sports competition and to inform sports fans of first-hand information onlarge sports events throughout the world. Different from traditional sports news which onlyfocuses on final results of sports events, modern sports news tends to report all thesports-related information catering to various tastes of sports enthusiasts, such as drug oralcohol abuse, on-pitch violence, sometimes even weddings and divorces of athletes, whichattracts a lot more attention from all circles of society than ever.In recent years, English sports news has received much attention from many experts andscholars. Based on the author s survey, previous studies on English sports news are mainlycentered on the linguistic features, translation techniques and discourse analysis, which payslittle attention to the attitudinal resources of sports news. When reporting sports activities,journalists sharing different value systems would inevitably express varied evaluation andjudgment on athletes, teams or coaches consciously or unconsciously, which makesJUDGMENT resources in English sports news a worthy subject to investigate.Appraisal Theory is an enrichment of interpersonal meaning that construes a newlexicon-grammatical framework in Systemic Functional Linguistics. It focuses on“thesemantics of evaluation—how the interlocutors are feeling, the judgments they make, and thevalue they place in the various phenomena of their experience” (Martin, 2000:144). In otherwords, Appraisal system focuses on describing and explaining the way language is used toevaluate person or thing, to express stance, and to arrange interpersonal position. Based onMartin & White (2005), it can be divided into three subsystems, namely Attitude, Engagementand Graduation. JUDGMENT, as one of the three subgenres of Attitude, copes with “attitudestowards behavior, which we admire or criticize, praise or condemn” (Martin & White,2008:42), which is evaluated on the basis of social norms and moral principles that are deeplyinfluenced by cultural value and ideology.
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1.2 Research Purpose and Significance
The present research attempts to make a contrastive analysis on JUDGMENT resourcesin English sports news written by Chinese and American sports journalists. To be morespecific, the purposes are to find out the disparate tendencies in using JUDGMENT resourcesin terms of the number of these linguistic resources between Chinese sports news andAmerican sports news. The contrastive study is conducted from four perspectives, namely,type, position, source as well as mode. In addition, the possible reasons attributed todifferences between Chinese and English sports news will be further discussed.Comparing English sports news written by Chinese and American media within theframework of Appraisal Theory has both theoretical importance and practical significance.Theoretically speaking, firstly, the present study employs the newly-developed theory, that is,the Appraisal Theory to study English sports news, which broadens the application ofAppraisal system in the field of news discourse, proves the feasibility of JUDGMENT systemin English sports news and somewhat provides a reference for other contrastive study onAttitude system. Secondly, this thesis, to some extent, offers a fresh perspective for theanalysis of sports news, hopefully enrich studies on news discourse under the framework ofAppraisal Theory.
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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter deals with a brief literature review on the following two fields: Judgmentand sports news. In the end of this chapter, the deficiencies of previous researches areconcluded, which verifies the significance of conducting the current study.

2.1 Studies of JUDGMENT
Language performs a lot of functions. According to Halliday, language serves threemetafunctions, namely, ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. Among them,interpersonal function enables one to use language to interact with others, maintainrelationships, convey attitude toward worldly things, and then influence others  viewpoints(Halliday, 1978:112). According to Halliday, interpersonal meaning is mainly realized bygrammatical means as mood and modality at syntax level. However, with the increasedstudies on interpersonal meaning, some scholars found that SFL put too much emphasis onexchange of meanings, i.e. information, goods and services, while little attention has beenpaid to evaluative function of language which is generally expressed by lexical choices andfew grammatical structures (Thompson 2000:65).J.R. Martin, an Australian linguist, found the missing link along with Peter White andproposed a new lexicon—grammatical framework called Appraisal Theory in 1990s. It isconcerned with “the kinds of attitude that are negotiated in the text, the strength of thefeelings involved and the ways in which values are sourced and readers aligned ” (Martin,2003:22). Appraisal Theory aims to examine the semantic evaluation in discourse, which isconsidered as more systematic as well as comprehensive than former related studies onattitudinal meaning as it contributes a lot to the categorization of appraisal lexicon (ZhangDelu & Liu Shizhu, 2006). It deals with the vocabulary choices selected to negotiate andexpress attitudes, stance and viewpoints, extending the scope of interpersonal meaning atlexical level. In other words, Appraisal Theory concentrates on how speakers/writers tactfullyuse language resources to pass JUDGMENTs on human behavior, objects and events, alignwith those who share similar ideas, influence attitudes of neutral hearers/readers, and keepdistance with those who see things differently. Martin & White (2008) classified AppraisalTheory into three subsystems, that is, Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. To be specific,Attitude is the core of evaluation while Engagement assists the whole system in dealing withthe source of attitudes, and Graduation stretches across the whole appraisal system modifyingAttitude and Engagement in different degrees. Specifically, the three subsystems can still befurther divided as the following figure shows.

2.2 Studies of Sports News
In this part, the author first gives an account of the definition of news and sports news,and then offers the features as well as classification of sports news. Afterwards, a reviewingpart about previous studies on sports news both at home and abroad will be followed.In past few decades, many experts and scholars had tried to define news from the pointof form and content of news. Some emphasize the form of news. For instance, news is brieflydefined as information or reports about recent events in Cambridge Dictionaries. Meanwhile,a great number of scholars tend to stress the attractiveness of content in news. For example,Burton Rascoe, the American editor and literary critic of the New York Herald Tribune holdsthat “a news sense is really a sense of what is important, what is vital, what is color of life—what people are interested in” (Burton Rascoe, 1922). And according to Laurence & Roland,News refers to “an account of current ideas, events or problems that interests people”(Laurence R Campbell & Roland E Wolseley, 1993), which emphasizes the timeliness as wellas interest of news. Moreover, a witty but incisive definition was once given by John Bogartin The New York Sun, “when a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dogthat is news” (Mencher, 1987). Charles A. Dana, the former critic in The New York Sun, sharesthe same idea of John Bogart and considers news as anything or reports that attract majorityof public. To sum up, from what has been demonstrated above, news is generally deemed asthe latest information or reports about current ideas, facts or events that attract public attentionthrough various channels. Furthermore, news reports can be classified into various typesbased on different criteria.
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CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY..... 20
3.1 Research Questions........... 20
3.2 Data Collection.......... 20
3.3 Research Approach........... 22
3.4 Analytical Procedure ........ 22
3.5 Measurement of JUDGMENT Resources.......24
CHAPTER FOUR RESULTS AND DISCUSSION ....31
4.1 Comparison of JUDGMENT Type ..........31
4.2 Comparison of JUDGMENT Position.....33
4.3 Comparison of JUDGMENT Source.......34
4.4 Comparison of JUDGMENT Mode.........35
4.5 Summary....38
CHAPTER FIVE CONCLUSION .......39
5.1 Major Findings..........39
5.2 Implications of the Study..........39
5.3 Limitations and Suggestions ....40

CHAPTER FOUR RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

This chapter is to show the outcomes of contrastive research on the JUDGMENTresources in English sports news written by Chinese as well as American sportswriters. Thequantitative results across the two corpora will be shown in the form of table 4.1 to 4.5,through which the differences in JUDGMENT type, position, source and mode can beinferred by reference to the significance level and the values of T-statistics as well asChi-squared statistics, and the discussions as well as potential reasons attributed to suchphenomena will be followed in each section.According to Richardson (2007), “journalism is inescapably connected to the social,political and cultural context in which it's written and consumed, and hence needs to berelocated in these contexts during analysis” (Richardson, 2007:221). The different tendenciesin using JUDGMENT type between the two media may be ascribe to different culturalpatterns. According to Hofsted s study, cultural patterns can be divided into collectivism andindividualism (Hofsted, 1980). China is well-known as an ancient civilized country that hasbeen deeply influenced by Confucianism, with its central theme emphasizing etiquette,altruism and filial piety. For this reason, collectivism is greatly advocated by our Chinesepeople in order to keep harmonious relationship with each other in groups, and to avoidconflicting with others. From the data we can see that Chinese sportswriters are likely toemploy less JUDGMENT resources for Social sanction which is harsher than Social esteem.They tend to use gentle word to evaluation players  behaviors. This may explain why there aremore JUDGMENT resources for social esteem in English sports news written by Chinesesportswriters. However, the United States enjoys the contrary cultural value——individualism.In United States, people think highly of individual rights. They don t think making directevaluation will bring trouble to others, instead they consider it as their rights to speak out theiropinions and ideas freely. And they dare to confront the dispute caused by their harshjudgment. This may explain why American sportswriters exploit more JUDGMENT resourcesfor Social sanction than Chinese journalists.
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conclusion

In present study, it is found that all the types of JUDGMENT resources were employedby Chinese and American writers. Based on the detailed and systematic study, the majorfindings of current research are briefly summarized as follows.As for the comparison of JUDMGNET type between the two corpora, there are certainsignificant differences. Chinese sportswriters are inclined to use more Social Esteem thanAmerican journalists, especially the JUDGMENT of Tenacity, whereas the number of SocialSanction in American sports newsis little more than that in Chinese corpus. There also existcertain similarities. It is found that Social Esteem outweighs Social Sanction in both twocorpora, with Capacity taking up the largest proportion, followed by Tenacity, Normality,Propriety and Veracity. In other words, sportswriters are prone to judging whether an athlete iscapable, technically skilled, persistent and resolute rather than focusing on morality andlegality of players  behaviors and performances.With regarding to the comparison of JUDGMENT position, there is no significantdifference between the two datasets; positive JUDGMENT plays a dominant role in all ofEnglish sports news so as to create an optimistic atmosphere.As for the comparison of JUDGMENT source, significant difference is found betweenthe two corpora. Non-authorial JUDGMENT is adopted more frequently than authorialJUDGMENT by Chinese writers, while American writers tend to express authorial attitudedirectly rather than non-authorial attitude.
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References (omitted)