ABSTRACT
The 7.5 Urumqi Riot was an incident of big influence in 2009, China. No sooner
had it happened than journalists from home and abroad rushed to Xinjiang to give their
instant reports. Among those foreign reports on the event, however, several reports from
major leading news media of western countries, such as CNN, BBC, deviate from the
truth. This phenomenon naturally arouses critics’ interests and attracts their attention to
make criticism. Different from present critical articles on these foreign news reports,
this thesis takes a dramatistic combining appraisal perspective to analyze. The
dramatistic perspective owes its theories mainly to Kenneth Burke, the greatest
rhetorician after Aristotle while the appraisal perspective to J. R. Martin, a well-known
Australian professor on the study of interpersonal meaning of language use.
Dramatism views language as symbolic action as well as drama, aiming to figure
out the rhetorical motives behind various discourses. As for dramatistic criticism, it
mainly includes three approaches, namely pentadic analysis, fantasy theme analysis and
narrative approach. This thesis adopts the most influential one—pentadic analysis. With
respect to its operation process, this approach first identifies the five pentadic elements
of a rhetorical act, then fixes the dominant one through an analysis of the pentadic ratios
the five elements form, and finally figures out the rhetorical motives far behind the
news discourse. As far as the process of appraisal system is concerned, words, phrases
or clauses in which the three kinds of evaluative resources occurring in the sample
reports are firstly identified, and then the frequency of the three subsystems of the
appraisal system is accounted to reveal the general feature of evaluative resources in
sample texts. The findings of appraisal analysis could be supportive of the findings
gained through dramatistic analysis.
With respect to sample texts analysis, the author selects three representative
foreign news reports which hold relatively contrastive standpoints towards the 7.5 Riot.
They are from three leading newspapers in two respective countries: the Time in the
United States, the Guardian and BBC in Britain. When analyzing, the author abides by a
main line of pentadic analysis and a supportive line of appraisal system analysis. To
assist the pentadic analysis, the author employs four other notions, namely argument,
terministic screen, logology and identification. The first three are employed to assist in