A Positive Discourse Analysis Of The Belt And Road News Reports From The Perspective Of Attitudinal Resources

President Xi Jinping proposed to jointly build the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21 st Century Maritime Silk Road(the Belt and Road Initiative)in 2013.This Initiative has received great attention from domestic and foreign Medias,and there occurred lots of relevant news reports.Scholars have also made a study of it from different disciplines.The Belt and Road news reports contain a large number of evaluation resources with rich interpersonal meanings,expressing the appraiser's attitude toward this theme.Therefore,it is worthy efforts to make a study on it from linguistic view.In addition,the positive evaluation language in news discourse plays an important role in the construction of the positive discourse model,which is also of great significance to the construction and dissemination of China's national image.In view of the great value of this Initiative,this thesis tries to find a theoretical basis from linguistics for the contribution of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the demonstration of its image.Appraisal Theory is a new development of interpersonal meaning from System Functional Linguistics.Martin reinterprets the function of interpersonal meaning in order to have a better understanding of the interpersonal meaning and the emotional expression in the discourses.Appraisal Theory consists of three subsystems: Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.This thesis will discuss news discourses only from the perspective of Attitude.Attitude is the core of Appraisal Theory,including affect,judgment and appreciation,and each of the sub-systems can evaluates the appraiser's attitudes from different perspectives.This study chooses 40 English news reports on the theme of the Belt and Road from 2015 to 2017 as the corpus.From the perspective of Positive Discourse Analysis,qualitative and quantitative methods are used to explore the profound connotations and far-reaching implications of the Belt and Road Initiative within the framework of Appraisal Theory.Firstly,this study will use the UAM corpus tool to annotate the attitudinal resources in the corpus,and then calculate the distribution of attitudinal resources,the distribution of the positive/negative and explicit/implicit attitudinal resources.Secondly,this thesis will make an analysis of the concrete realization of sub-systems of attitudinal resources in some cases.Finally,a further analysis will be made to interpret the connotation and social values of the Belt and Road Initiative on the basis of statistics.It is firstly found that the appreciation resources among the attitudinal resources accounts for the largest proportion(67.20%),and the ratio of valuation and impact is larger than other appreciation resources.They explain the connotations and social values of the Belt and Road Initiative.And then the ratio of judgement resources takes up 25.72%,among which the percentage of capacity is largest and the tenacity is in the secondary place.They tell readers the ability of Chinese government and reflect the determination and support of Chinese government.Finally,the affect resources occupies the least number(6.97%),which can reflect that the appraisers' attitudes in the discourses are more objective towards this Initiative.A large number of positive attitudinal resources in the selected news reports affirm the positive significance of the Belt and Road Initiative.Although there are also a few negative evaluative words in the discourses,most of which appear in the negative sentences,which strengthen the positive effect of evaluation.