A Corpus-based Study On The Attitudes In Indian English News Towards The Belt And Road Initiatives

As a national strategy,the Belt and Road Initiatives(BRI)has drawn much attention since it was proposed.The BRI aims to promote the development and cooperation between countries along the Silk Road,the success of which lies in the support of neighboring countries.India,the second largest developing country in the world,plays a critical role in the realization of the BRI.Additionally,India has the largest scale of news media in the South Asia,and English,as an official language of India,is widely used in the middle and upper class.But most of previous studies in China tended to concentrate on a limited number of Indian newspapers,which left many Indian newspapers and their reportages untouched.Furthermore,given that there exist some misunderstandings of the Initiatives,the promotion of it to the neighboring countries need to be improved.Therefore,this thesis investigates the attitudes of BRI-related English news in India from multiple perspectives.A corpus-based discourse study with the help of sentiment lexicon was conducted in the thesis.With evaluative words as clues of research,the attitude of Indian news was examined quantitatively and qualitatively.We find that news about BRI concentrates mainly on events related to India,and apart from a few major newspapers,news about the Initiatives does not frequently occur in other newspapers.The analysis also reveals that the majority of Indian newspapers hold a wait-and-see attitude towards the Initiatives.Although positive words occur much more frequently than negative ones in news,only a small part of news expresses approval to China's move.Additionally,quite a bit of news presents misunderstandings of or doubts about the Initiatives.Against this background,it is of great importance for China to strengthen publicity,to clear up misunderstandings and to conduct further studies of China's image in foreign media.