A Comparative Study Of Attitude Resources In Chinese And American COVID-19 Vaccine News About China

Since the outbreak of COVID-19 at the end of 2019,Chinese government has taken a series of scientific measures to deal with this new public health threat.One of the most important works is to actively carry out the manufacture of COVID-19 vaccine.After the vaccine successfully developed,China provided vaccine assistance to countries with COVID-19 vaccine shortage,and contributed to make vaccines global public goods.However,some American media have made malicious speculation and slander on it.This thesis makes a comparative study of Chinese and American COVID-19 Vaccine News about China,and explores the evaluation positions and attitudes behind their language expression,which will be of great significance for China’s good international image,COVID-19 vaccine promotion and global epidemic prevention and control.Guided by the attitude system of Appraisal Theory,60 reports of COVID-19 vaccine about China are selected from China Daily(CD)and The New York Times(NYT)to make a study.This study mainly answers and solves the following three questions:1.What attitude resources are used in Chinese and American COVID-19 vaccine news about China?2.What are the similarities and differences of attitude resources distribution in Chinese and American COVID-19 vaccine news about China?3.What are the evaluation positions and attitudes hidden behind the attitude resources in Chinese and American COVID-19 vaccine news about China?In order to solve the above research questions,this study uses UAM Corpus Tool 3.3x to manually annotate the attitude resources in the corpus.SPSS Statistics 25 is applied to make chi-square test on the frequency data to observe whether there are significant differences in the distribution of attitude resources between the two media.Finally,the evaluation positions and attitudes behind the news text are interpreted qualitatively.The major findings of this study are presented as below:Firstly,both CD and NYT employed a great deal of attitude resources,and all the categories under its three subsystems appeared.Among them,judgement resources take up the largest proportion,appreciation resources rank second,and the percentage of affect resources is the least.This distribution conforms to the objectivity of news.According to the Chi-square test results,there is no significant difference in the overall distribution of the attitude resources in the two media,which shows the similar distribution rules.However,there is a significant difference between Chinese and American media in the polarity of attitude resources.CD generally holds a positive attitude in this kind of news,while NYT has more negative resources.Secondly,there are also some similarities and differences in the distribution of attitude resources between CD and NYT.As for similarities,in affect system,security resources are the most frequent resources in Chinese and American media,followed by satisfaction resources.These two subsystems occupy the majority of affect resources.In Judgment system,the proportion of social esteem is more than that of social sanction,and capability and propriety are the most common resources in both media.Then,the frequency of reaction resources in appreciation system is the least in both CD and NYT.As for differences,in CD,propriety resources take up the highest proportion in judgment system,and valuation resources are the most frequently used in appreciation system.While in American media,capability resources take up the highest proportion in judgment system.The most frequently used appreciation resources in NYT are complexity resources,and it is much higher than that of balance resources.Thirdly,due to the differences in political,economic and institutional setting,the two media hold different attitudes and evaluation positions on COVID-19 vaccine news about China.CD has a positive attitude towards the efficacy of Chinese vaccines and the epidemic control measures taken by China government.China made great efforts to promote COVID-19 vaccine become a global public product and contributed to the world epidemic prevention.While NYT shows a negative attitude in these reports.They hold that China’s epidemic prevention measures are unreasonable and portray China’s kind donation of vaccines as“vaccine diplomacy”.This study enriches the application scope of attitude system of Appraisal Theory in analyzing reports related in medical and health fields.Furthermore,this research can cultivate readers’ critical thinking in news reading.And it has a positive effect on the international community’s correct view of China’s image and understanding of Chinese COVID-19 vaccine.