ABSTRACT

The linguistic strategy of appeal to pity, also known as Ad Misericordiam, is main to arose the audiences’ pity for evidence in an argumentation. It is one of the most frequent means used in news report and editorial. This paper chooses 10 pieces of news comments or editorials which adopt appeal to pity as the corpus of this research from the Washington Post during December 1, 2014 to April 15, 2015. This paper is going to analyze the application of appeal to pity in the discourse of news report and editorial.

The study found that the key to applying appeal to pity can be embodied by effectively evoking the audience’s sympathy, which involves in the usage of rhetoric, the presence of context and the choosing of subjects during a report and news comment. In other words, in order to successful use the appeal to pity in an argumentation, the western reporters often tend to adopt the rhetoric of comparison between two different things, to highly depend on the context, to carefully choose typical individuals as their targets of news report. Besides, appeal to pity can be classified as the direct and indirect ones. The former is trying to have the audiences’ pity by the explicit calling and declaration. And the later is by the implicit description and explanation. This paper also can prove that appeal to pity is obviously advantageous in persuading the audiences and delivering the values during the news report. Therefore, this study can do some help to domestic press in the terms of increasing its ability of persuasion..

Key words: News Commentary Discourse; Appeal to Pity; Pragma-Dialectical; Argumentation 

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABSTRACT

摘要

Chapter One  INTRODUCTION-1

Chapter Two  LITERATURE REVIE-3

2.1 Studies on Argumentation-3

2.2 Studies on Appeal to Pity -5

2.3 Summary-7

Chapter Three  RESEARCH DESIGN-8

3.1 Research Objective and Questions-8

3.2 Data Collection-8

3.3 Research Methods-9

Chapter Four  RESULTS AND DISCUSSION-10

4.1. Types of Appeal to Pity Used in the Washington Post..-10

4.1.1 Direct type-10

4.1.2 Indirect type-11

4.2. Functions of Appeal to Pity Used in the Washington Post..-12

     4.2.1 Persuasive function-12

     4.2.2 Provocative function -13

Chapter Five  CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS-16

5.1 Major Findings-16

5.2 Implications-17

5.3 Limitations and Further Research-17

REFERENCES-19