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.
