A Study On The Attitudes In English News From Countries Along Maritime Silk Road Towards Belt And Road Initiatives

The Belt and Road Initiatives(BRI)aims to promote the development and cooperation between countries along the Silk Road.Therefore,understanding the attitude of these countries' news reports towards BRI is of positive significance to the construction of a new type of international relations oriented toward win-win cooperation.In this research,four corpora and one reference corpus are built.Based on the sentiment lexicon,the characteristics of positive and negative words are investigated.Besides,the keywords and their concordance lines are explored.The results suggest that in all of the four corpora,with the positive/negative ratio of 2.43?2.41?1.96?1.81 respectively,the frequency of positive words exceeds that of negative ones.And the news discourses from SEABRIN and ABRIN display a more positive attitude towards BRI than SABRIN and WABRIN.The analysis of positive words,negative words and keywords reveals that cooperation and communication under BRI are the main foci for most countries.Besides,in SEABRIN,news discourse lay emphasis on China's positive image in dealing with regional conflict.In SABRIN,the general attitude towards BRI is comparatively negative,especially when it comes to the relationship between China and India.In WABRIN,news discourse reveals that the major attention has been paid to the resources of strategic significance such as crude oil.In ABRIN,news discourse demonstrates African countries'willingness to join BRI and reduce poverty with the opportunity it brings.Though most countries hold a positive attitude towards BRI,there still exist countries(e.g.India,Sir Lanka and Maldives)that express opposition to this initiative.Under this background,it is of great importance for China to strengthen publicity,to clear up misunderstandings and to conduct further studies on news discourses in foreign media.