Interpreting Attitude Resources in China Daily Editorials

Authors

  • Meng Tian

Keywords:

Appraisal, Attitude resources, ideology, power, China Daily

Abstract

Editorials play a significant role in conveying newspaper’s opinions and influencing the viewpoints or ideology of their readers with careful selections and configurations of certain resources of Appraisal. This study is concerned with the social function of Attitude resources by which editorial writers express their attitudes. It examines and elaborates the patterns and preferences of Attitude resources in 35 editorials from China Daily in terms of the three subcategories: Affect, Judgment and Appreciation. The findings indicate that values of Propriety and Capability and Valuation occur much more frequently in the data than the others values. However, Affect states are rare. Explicit attitudes outweigh implicit ones to make reading easy and therefore align readers. The writers also prefer rank attitudes highly to win over putative readers. The functionalities of the deployment of the resources are interpreted in terms of conveying ideology in the editorials and manipulating readers with power in the concluding remarks.

Author Biography

Meng Tian

Shanxi Normal University, P.R. China

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