A Contrastive Analysis Of Attitudinal Resources In The News Reports Of China Daily And Time About Xinjiang

News discourse, as a social practice, is not only the product of the interaction of different powers and ideologies, but also can reflect different cultural backgrounds and policies. Thus, it has been a target that discourse researchers have focused on and studied for a long time. Positive discourse analysis, advocated by Martin and his colleagues, is a new perspective of discourse analysis and aims to build a positive way to analyze the discourse. The thesis adopts Fairclough?s “three-dimensional” model as a theoretical framework and Martin?s Appraisal Theory as an analytical tool. It intends to make a contrastive analysis of the attitudinal resources in the news reports on Xinjiang in China Daily and Time.The data in the study consists of twenty sets of news reports from China Daily and Time with the background of Xinjiang?s serial violent and terrorist events, covering the topics of history, economy, safety, social atmosphere, news reporting and so on. On the basis of the qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis and contrastive analysis, the thesis conducts a detailed analysis of the attitudinal resources in the selected data. The main purpose of the study is to identify and analyze the distributional features and linguistic devices of the attitudinal resources of the two newspapers and to explore the different ideologies embedded in the news reports.The conclusions of the study can be summarized as below:(1) The distributional features of the attitudinal resources are: In both China Daily and Time, Judgement resources are used the most, Affect resources and Appreciation resources only take up a little proportion. As for the differences, China Daily employs more Judgement resources, and Time applies more Affect resources.(2) It is found that nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, noun phrases, verb phrases and prepositional phrases are used in the realization of attitudinal meaning. The main linguistic devices used by the two newspapers in the study are nouns, verbs, adjectives and verb phrases. The difference is that China Daily employs more nouns and verb phrases and Time employs more verbs and adjectives.(3) In both China Daily and Time, negative attitudinal resources dominate over positive attitudinal resources. The difference is that China Daily applies more positive attitudinal resources than Time. In China Daily, more positive attitudinal resources are applied to the description of the appraised such as “the Chinese authority”, “police” and “Xinjiang”, and more negative attitudinal resources are applied to the description of the appraised such as “attack”, “terrorism/terrorists”, “attackers”, “separatists” and “the public”. In Time, almost all negative attitudinal resources are applied to describing the above mentioned appraised objects.(4) The differences in political, economic and cultural ideologies mainly lead to the differences of the reporting attitude.It is feasible and applicable to do contrastive analysis of attitudinal resources of the news reports in China Daily and Time about Xinjiang with the combination of Fairclough?s “three-dimensional” model and the Appraisal Theory. The thesis expands the research scope of positive discourse analysis and it is a fine supplement to positive discourse analysis. Besides, it helps readers to understand the role that attitudinal resources play in the news discourse and to explore the hidden ideologies embedded in the language.