| Beijing Winter Olympic Games officially opened on February 4,2022.Sweden,a country that has a long history and a strong tradition of winter sports,was a significant participant.From the year before the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics until after its closing,the Swedish media paid great attention to the event and reported it extensively.However,besides sports-related news,there were also some reports that involve politics.The Olympic Games are an international social movement that bridges mutual understanding between peoples,popularizes Olympism around the world and maintains world peace.However,the Swedish media followed the American media by hyping up political events and calling for a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics.Although news reports usually claim to be objective in content,impartial in evaluation,and neutral in opinion,many scholars are skeptical,arguing that there is subjectivity and implicit preference in news reports,and that the media use such a way to infiltrate implicit ideological meaning to all sectors of society.This study takes the Swedish mainstream newspaper media coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics as an example,and on the basis of Appraisal Theory,comparatively investigates the features of attitude resources in Swedish and English of the Winter Olympics news,and analyzes the differences in the Swedish media’s attitudes with regard to different readers,the underlying ideologies,and the potential reasons.This study collected Swedish reports on the Beijing Winter Olympics from January 1,2021,to April 30,2022,in both the Swedish and English languages.Within the framework of Appraisal Theory,we compared the attitudes towards the Beijing Winter Olympics in Swedish and English reports of Swedish media.The material for the self-built news corpus is collected from news coverage of the Beijing Winter Olympics in the Swedish and English columns of seven mainstream Swedish media.The top mainstream media are Swedish Television Ltd,Today’s News,Swedish Daily News,The Evening Paper,The Express,Today’s Industry,and Gothenburg Post.Two sub-corpora were built,namely the Swedish Beijing Winter Olympic News Corpus(SNC,80837 tokens)and the English Beijing Winter Olympic News Corpus(ENC,76219 tokens).The attitude resources were manually annotated with the help of the UAM corpus tool.The frequency of words expressing attitudes were statistically analyzed,and the attitudes of the two sub-corpora towards the Beijing Winter Olympics and the host country China were quantitatively and qualitatively studied,as well as invoked attitude and the other aspects of the attitude system.On news texts,issue classification was conducted,as well as the integration and analysis of a large number of news texts.Finally,this thesis analyzed the potential reasons of the differences in attitude between the two sub-corpora.The significant findings of the study are,1.There are more attitude resources in SNC than in ENC.2.In three types of attitude resources,appreciation has the highest frequency,then judgement,and finally affect in SNC.In ENC,it is also that appreciation has the highest frequency,followed by judgement and affect.3.There are also differences in the distribution of attitude in each attitudinal category.In ENC,the attitude resources expressing affect are the fewest among the three categories in the two sub-corpora.In judgement,there are more attitude resources expressing capacity in ENC.In SNC,there are more attitude resources expressing propriety.In both sub-corpora,appreciation has the highest frequency.Swedish media are more concerned with the reaction to the Beijing Winter Olympics.4.In explicitness,inscribed attitudes are expressed significantly more than invoked attitudes in both sub-corpora.In ENC,the frequency and proportion of invoked attitude in judgement are almost double that in SNC.In SNC,the frequency and percentage of invoked attitude in appreciation are almost twice as high as in ENC.5.The two sub-corpora differ significantly in terms of attitude-polarity.The negative attitudes are significantly more in SNC,and the positive attitudes are significantly more in ENC.In terms of appraiser and appraised,there is a significant difference between the two sub-corpora.In SNC,attitude resources are less directly expressed by authors and appear more in quoting other media and interviewees’ remarks than in ENC.In SNC,attitude resources are more about people and events related to China,while in ENC,they are more focused on Nordic and Swedish individuals and events.6.Swedish media has an ambivalent attitude towards China.This thesis comparatively examines the attitudes of the Swedish media in covering the Beijing Winter Olympics when facing different groups of readers.This study provides a new perspective on a systemic attitude study through a corpus-based approach.It also adds a new language study to attitude research. |
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