Positive Discourse Analysis Of China’s Government Press Conference On Public Health Emergency

In recent years, public health emergencies occur frequently in China. In the process of tackling various public emergencies, the government press conference plays a very important role in communicating and connecting with the society. At present, most researches on the government press conference are based on mass communication or rhetoric strategies, while studies from the perspective of linguistics gain less attention. This paper attempts to make a positive discourse analysis of China’s government press conference based on Appraisal theory within Systemic Functional Linguistics.Appraisal theory, an extension of interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics, includes three systems:Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Among them, Attitude system expresses the negotiated positive and negative attitude in discourses via the positive and negative evaluated resources. Attitude system provides a new perspective for positive discourse analysis through the evaluation from the positive and negative dimensions. This thesis chooses government press conferences on public health emergency as the case, collects20Chinese texts from China.net as the data and adopts qualitative and quantitative research methods in the study. Based on the framework of Attitude and the annotation with the UAM Corpus Tool3.0, this thesis aims to find out how attitudinal meanings are constructed and how communicative functions are realized from the perspective of positive discourse analysis. Some major findings are shown as follows. Firstly, positive attitude resources are far more than negative ones. Through abundant positive attitude resources, the news spokesmen intends to show the confidence and capability of Chinese government in controlling the epidemic so as to direct the attitude of the journalists and the public. Secondly, the three subsystems of Attitude are not evenly distributed. Judgment resources significantly ranks higher than Affect and Appreciation resources. Thirdly, among all the Attitude resources, the news spokesmen employ considerably positive Judgment evaluations to display the capability, determination and responsibility of the relevant government sectors in the face of public health emergencies and further strengthen the public’s trust and confidence in the government and build a harmonious relationship between the two parties. Moreover, Appreciation and Affect resources serve to strengthen Judgment to some extent. The spokesmen apply positive Affect and Appreciation resources to encourage the whole society to join the anti-disease campaign.This thesis conducts a positive discourse analysis of the official discourse in Chinese press conference on public health emergency. This study, to some extend, broadens the research of the government press conference from linguistic perspective and extends the application of PDA, particularly in Chinese. Therefore, the present research has certain practical and theoretical significance both in discourse analysis of the press conference and the application of positive discourse analysis.