Engagement resources in the English news texts of two phases in China’s constructing Greater Bay Area

Abstract

This study examined the similarities and differences in the distribution and quantitative use of engagement resources in the English news texts of two phases which are demarcated by an important document issued by the Chinese government in constructing the Greater Bay Area (GBA) by drawing on the engagement framework of the appraisal system in Systemic Functional Linguistics. Sixty English news reports of these two phases, each with a length of 800–1200 words, were collected and all the engagement resources were coded and calculated on the UAM corpus tool (version 6) before comparisons were made in terms of the quantitative use and distribution of each sub-category. The findings show that more dialogic expansion resources are present in the English news texts on GBA than dialogic contraction resources and that the most used and the least used strategies in the news reports are entertain resources and distance resources respectively. Moreover, in terms of the comparison of the sub-category, the distribution of the endorse strategy is significantly different in these two phases.

Keywords:

• news texts
• Greater Bay Area
• engagement framework
• dialogic space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This paper was partly funded by a grant from the Guangdong Innovative Youth Talents program (No. 2021WQNCX079).

Notes on contributors

Fan Cao

Fan Cao is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and functional linguistics.