A Comparative Analysis of Attitude Resources in Chinese and American English News Reports on “Roe v. Wade”

In 1973, "Roe v. Wade" (hereinafter referred to as Roe) became one of the important judgements in modern American society because of its establishment of women's reproductive choice. In 2022, the US Supreme Court officially overturned the Roe case, which also caused an uproar at home and abroad. News media, as an important information dissemination medium, widely influences readers' attitudes and opinions. This paper mainly conducted by the application of the Appraisal Theory, which has developed by the linguist J. R. Martin covering three subsystems: attitude, engagement and graduation, to the study of news reports concerning the Roe. The study is focus on the perspective of the attitude system, and the research corpus consists of a total of 10 news articles selected from two mainstream media both in China and the U.S., China Daily and New York Times. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, this study has discussed in detail the attitude resources in the overturning of Roe in Chinese and American news discourse. Through analysis and comparison, the author finds that there are similarities and differences in the overall distribution of attitude resources between the two media. First of all, the distribution of attitude resources between the two sides is roughly in the same trend. Secondly, New York Times employs more attitude resources than that of China Daily, with a dominant air of negative attitude resources.