| The present study attempts to reveal the changes of our society’s attitudes towards chengguan and peddlers in the news reports in Guangzhou over a seven-year period of time(from 2007 to 2014).With the development of Guangzhou urbanization,many social phenomena have caught people’s attention.The issue of chengguan and peddlers has been one of the prominent social phenomena kept in people’s mind for a long time,which has raised our concern.It interests us whether the society’s attitudes towards these two contradictory groups have experienced any changes.With this social background,the present research is conducted.A small corpus is formed,consisting of 37 pieces of news reports in Guangzhou Daily,about 4300 –4700 words in each year.These news reports are mainly critiques and comments on chengguan and peddlers.To reveal the society’s attitudes towards chengguan and peddlers,Fairclough’s three-dimensional models,Martin and White’s Attitude System and core socialist values are adopted as the theoretical and analytical framework.To the best of our knowledge,core socialist values have not been employed in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.The present study tries to combine core socialist values with Fairclough’s three-dimensional models and Attitude System for the first time.Based on this framework,both a qualitative and a quantitative analytical method are employed.The present study aims to investigate the society’s attitude changes towards chengguan and peddlers,which are determined by the attitude resources reflected in the data.First,the manifestations of attitudes in the data on chengguan and peddlers are presented,which refer to judgment in Attitude System.Generally speaking,positive,negative,and neutral judgments correspond to 1 point,-1 point,and 0.5point respectively.Therefore,the points are calculated to be points of chengguan and peddlers.Then,based on the points we have achieved,if the manifestations of attitudes go through any changes are examined and analyzed,under the background of Guangzhou city.Meanwhile,the reasons why such changes occur are discussed.These three steps relate to the three research questions in the present study.There are several findings after the research is conducted.The overall conclusion is that the society’s attitudes towards chengguan and peddlers experienced some changes from 2007 to 2014,which is reflected by judgment in Attitude System.The seven-year period of time can be divided into three stages.The first stage covers 2007 and 2008,when the society’s attitudes tended to have leant to peddlers.The second stage is from 2009 to 2011,when the society held positive attitudes towards chengguan;in 2010 and 2011,the society had positive attitudes for both chengguan and peddlers.The third stage is from 2012 to 2014,when the society held negative attitudes towards chengguan and peddlers,but these two groups of people coincided in development trend and had no great gap,reflecting that their relationship might have become conciliatory.To be specific,first,in 2007 and 2008 the society’s attitudes leant to peddlers,who had higher value than chengguan;the difference was much bigger in 2007 but it became smaller in 2008.Second,in 2009,the value of chengguan surpassed that of peddlers;moreover,from 2009 to 2014,it kept exceeding that of peddlers.Third,in2010 and 2011,both chengguan and peddlers got high value.Besides,chengguan get much higher value than peddlers in 2010.Last but not least,from 2012 to 2014,the value of chengguan and the value of peddlers lower down;2013 became a little bit higher than the other two years.All these findings have to do with the social events in the period of time in Guangzhou: Guangzhou’s application for and failure to National Civilized Cities in 2008,the new ‘Comprehensive Law Enforcement Regulations on Guangzhou City Management’ implemented in 2009,the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games,and Guangzhou’s application for and success of National Civilized Cities in 2011.The findings seem to tell us some close relations between the news reports and the social events.The news reports are products and reflections of the society.The present study verifies that news reports can reflect society’s attitudes through language.Meanwhile,the present study shows that the society’s attitudes can be investigated via attitude resources(judgments in Attitude System in this case).Discourse and society are closely connected: society influences discourse while discourse reflects society.It is feasible that the society’s changes can be readily noticed from language,which does good to co-build our harmonious society. |
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