A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of News Reports On "the Belt And Road" From Chinese And American Newspapers

Since “the Belt and Road” was proposed by Xi Jinping,President of China,in 2013,it has been widely reported by Chinese and Western media over the past three years.However,there are few domestic scholars who carry contrastive studies on “the Belt and Road” from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA)was emerged in the late 1970 s with the aim to reveal the ideology hidden behind the discourse from the perspective of critical analysis.Since it was proposed,it has been widely applied in news discourse analysis.Nowadays,news discourse has become one of the main ways for people to obtain information,and it can affect the readers' attitudes and views when interpreting an event.Therefore,the present research selected 40 English news reports on “the Belt and Road” from China Daily,40 from New York Times and the Washington Post,and then built two small-scale corpora.The text,discursive practice and socio-cultural practice of the selected news reports are analyzed respectively at three stages: description,interpretation and explanation within the general framework of Fairclough's Three-dimensional Model with Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and the corpus-based approach as the analytical tools.At the description stage,analytical tools like classification(high-frequency words,concordance lines),transitivity and modality are explored;at the interpretation stage,intertextuality including the news source and reporting mode is explored;at the third stage,the institutional context and socio-cultural context of the selected news reports are explored in detail so as to illustrate the hidden ideology in the reporting.The findings show that:(1)At the description stage,the high-frequency words and concordance lines indicate that the two countries' newspapers both focus on the description of the connotation and influence of “the Belt and Road” in terms of classification.Material process is dominantly employed by the two countries' newspapers,followed by verbal process and relational process.In terms of modality,modal verbs of median value are most frequently adopted by both Chinese and American newspapers to show their objectivity.However,there also exists differences at this stage.The Chinese newspapers choose more positive words in classification and transitivity process to construct the connotation of “the Belt and Road”.They adopt modal verbs of high and low values to illustrate the responsibility of China to promote “the Belt and Road” smoothly and the realizability of it.While the American newspapers choose more negative words in classification and transitivity process to politicize “the Belt and Road” and adopt modal verbs ofhigh and low values to negate and doubt this project.(2)At the interpretation stage,both the Chinese and American newspapers prefer indirect discourse and direct discourse with specific news source to show their objectivity.However the contents they quote are significantly different.The Chinese newspapers stress the feasibility of “the Belt and Road” and its significance to other countries along the border.While the American newspapers exaggerate China's ambitions and the infeasibility of “the Belt and Road” by choosing the quotations from so-called experts and scholars.(3)At the explanation stage,the analysis shows that the mainstream newspapers are served for their governments' interests.Because of the different social ideologies and the competitive relationship,the Chinese and American newspapers' reporting concerns and orientations as well as the image of “the Belt and Road” they present are different.The present research can offer a new angle for the researches on “the Belt and Road” and enrich the application of CDA on news discourse.This research can also raise the reader's awareness of critical reading and help them understand the American journalists' real attitude toward “the Belt and Road” as well as the ideology and social factors that contribute to such an attitude by means of corpus methods.What's more,this research can provide some implications on how to avoid the misunderstandings from the Western countries when promoting this project afterwards.