| In the Internet age,source of information is largely dependent on network media coverage,and readers' personal judgments tend to be influenced by the media's report.Therefore,network news media is very important for representing and constructing a country's image in international communication.However,China's images in the international community are often determined by foreign media.In addition,with the gradual enhancement of China's economic,political and military strength,China's images in the world has been particularly noticeable in the process of the rise of China,especially for its neighbors,Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries.Hence,the study of China's images in Kazakhstan's network media has important theoretical and practical significance.It hopes that this study can provide a clearer understanding of the China's images and a new perspective for the “self-shaping” images of China by analyzing the “others-shaping” images of China represented in the mainstream network media in Kazakhstan.The study of China's images in news discourse has drawn wide attention from many disciplines,such as news media,history and culture and literature,public relations,international politics,international relations and linguistics because of its unique interdisciplinary nature.This study is a research on the representation of national image by news commentary,which is a good interdisciplinary and empirical study of linguistics that closely combines the research of language system and that of language use.On one hand,the representation,promotion and maintenance of national image cannot separate from the language.News discourse is an important carrier and intermediary for the linguistic representation of national image.However,reports of news media are not neutral to deal with different views and positions.Instead,they convey their positions and attitudes through their choices of events,ways of narration,comments,etc.,to affect audiences' view on events.Therefore,the study of national image represented in news media is the study of attitude of the news media toward national image.Martin proposes Appraisal theory based on the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics.The theory focuses on attitudinal resources that speaker/author uses to express a particular attitude and negotiate these positions with actual or potential responders.Attitude is the center of Appraisal theory,which is concerned with “our feeling,including emotional reactions,judgement of behavior and evaluation of things”.There are three subsystems in Appraisal theory: Affect,Judgement,and Appreciation.Language in this system is a means to realize attitude,i.e.,to convey language users' position,views,and attitudes toward the appraised through explicit and implicit ways.On the other hand,Cultural pragmatics holds that discourse construction is information processing occurring in the constructor's cultural context,in which their choices of utterances and discourse units reflects the cultural orientation of constructors.The same is true of national image represented by news discourse.News discourse is an act of communication produced by news constructors as cultural identity.Consciousness of cultural identity of news constructors will influence representations and constructions of national image.Attitudinal resource is a linguistic reference system for news reporters to conduct cultural processing when representing specific events.Therefore,national images represented and constructed by news discourse can be understood as practices or acts of Cultural pragmatics.As far as China's images are concerned,“others-shaping” images of China represented in news commentaries of mainstream network in Kazakhstan not only indicates the cultural attitude of Kazakhstan as a close neighbor to China,but also conveys consciousness of cultural identity of Kazakhstan and its transnational cultural context.Theory of cultural context based on Cultural pragmatics can provide new research ideas for the study of “self-shaping” images of China in news discourse,so that the research of China's images will be more comprehensive.Based on Attitude system,this study analyzes the attitudinal tendency of China's images represented by the news commentaries related to China in mainstream network of Kazakhstan and the linguistic realizations employed in the representation of China's images.Then,based on theory of cultural context of Cultural pragmatics,the study puts forward some linguistic suggestions on how to represent a positive image of China in Central Asia by analyzing the cultural context involved in “others-shaping” images of China represented in news commentaries of Kazakhstan.Selected data of this study is from one of the largest media in Kazakhstan,Kazakhstan International News Agency(KAZINFORM)online edition,which is also an importantly national news agency and world agency.The research focuses on the following three issues:1)What kinds of China's images are represented in the news commentaries related to China in KAZINFORM? Are they positive or negative?2)What explicit and implicit attitudinal resources are employed to represent China's images in the news commentaries related to China in KAZINFORM?3)What are the linguistic suggestions for “self-shaping” images of China in Central Asia,which inspired from cultural context of Kazakhstan involved in the news commentaries related to China in KAZINFORM?The combination of quantitative and qualitative study is conducted in this study.In qualitative study,based on the Martin & White's and White's discussion on positive attitudes and negative ones,and explicit attitudes and implicit ones,this thesis carries out qualitative analysis which reconsiders and integrates the existing analytical framework of Appraisal theory,and establishes the analytical framework and parameters for this thesis,providing an analytical model for the quantitative study.In addition,based on the results of quantitative research,this paper makes qualitative analysis of the cultural context of Kazakhstan involved in the corpus,and of a positive image of China at the linguistic level.In the aspect of quantitative study,network version of KAZINFORM is collected to find the types of reports that meet the requirements of the news commentary.The time span of the corpus is from January 1,2015 to December 31,2016.210 news commentaries related to China's images were collected and formed a self-built corpus for future analysis.All attitudinal resources are tagged under the framework of qualitative research,while AntConc 3.4.4 is used for frequency statistics and Concordance of the data.Based on statistics distributions of attitudinal resources related to China's images in KAZINFORM and interpersonal meaning of three subsystems are obtained.Moreover,the law and function of linguistic realization is found out.The results of the study show that: 1)KAZINFORM holds a positive attitude toward China's images,especially toward China and Kazakhstan's foreign relations,in which China's image is represented as a mutual trust and beneficial cooperation partners and a friendly and helpful neighbor.However,KAZINFORM still holds a certain negative attitude toward the images of China,which is reflected in its responses to the “China Threat Theory” rendered by the western countries.2)Because of the “objectivity” of the news commentary,frequency of Affect resources are the least,and there are high frequencies of Judgment resources and Appreciation resources,which proves that news commentaries related to China's images of KAZINFORM are of certain objectivity.In addition,positive Appreciation and negative Judgement amount to the highest frequency respectively,which indicates that KAZINFORM is more inclined to affirm the social significance of what China does,and to negate the Chinese behavior from the moral standards.Finally,KAZINFORM tends to use explicitness to express positive or negative attitude toward China's images,especially attitudinal adjectives.All implicitness express negative attitudes toward China and experiential materials of evocation are frequently used linguistic realization.3)Based on analysis of cultural context of Kazakhstan,this study concludes that at the language level,representation of positive images of China in central Asian countries should be achieved from three aspects of “tell Chinese story well”: who to tell,what to tell,and how to tell with specific examples and suggestions based on the above two findings. |
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