| Previous researches on the “the Belt and Road Initiative”(shortened for BRI)news reports are mainly conducted from Critical Discourse Analysis,Positive Discourse Analysis and cross-cultural perspectives.Unfortunately,their studies are not concerned with the links between syntactic features and the hidden meanings behind the news reports,which makes the attitudes and opinions of the reports veiled.To certain extent,a study on the relationship between forms and meanings of the news reports from construal operation perspective will be greatly beneficial to a thorough understanding of the discursive intentionality and directionality.Based on the Construal Theory,this study chooses 20 news reports related to “the Belt and Road Initiative” from the Washington Post(approximately 22789 tokens),and adopts both the qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze how discursive strategies are reflected through the construal operations like schematization,focus,profiling and scanning.This study aims to clarify the US media’s attitudes and stances towards China’s initiative via a cognitive perspective of these operations.Through the observation of the samples chosen from the Washington Post,the major findings can be drawn: 1)in most of the BRI news from the Washington Post,“China” is placed in the subject position functioning as the agentive actor of the action chain event,which implies that US government intends China to take the responsibility of the BRI events;2)the Washington Post prefers to mystify China as the agentive actor in action events,and to highlight China as a negative image by agentless passives and nominalization,which means US government is doubtful about the capability of China and smearing China’s efforts in promoting the BRI;3)the grammatical patterns in most China-related BRI news are inclined to adopt summary scanning to conceptualize the negative events,while sequential scanning is used to conceptualize the positive events,implying that the U.S news institutions seek to understate China’s efforts or positive achievements in the promotion of BRI.This study is significant because it analyzes the discursive strategies employed in the BRI news through a cognitive linguistic approach: an integration of construal operation with Critical Discourse Analysis. |
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