A Positive Discourse Analysis Of Appraisal Resources In The News Reports On "the Belt And Road" From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

In September and October of 2013,while visiting countries in Central Asia and Southeast Asia,president Xi Jinping proposed the initiative of jointly building the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21 st Century Maritime Silk Road,which is called the Belt and Road Initiative.It has aroused the great attention of mass media across different disciplines at home and abroad.From the perspective of linguistics,news discourse is always a hot spot in discourse analysis.Previous discourse analysis prefers Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA),probing into hidden ideology or power relations.Positive Discourse Analysis(PDA)is easy to ignore.PDA mainly employs a positive and friendly attitude to analyse discourse,whose ultimate purpose is to build a tolerant and harmonious society.To make up for the interpersonal meaning in Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL),Appraisal Theory is proposed by Martin in the 1990 s.Appraisal Theory attaches importance to the evaluative functions of language with lexis.The investigation of stance and attitude of the appraiser behind language form provides a new try for discourse analysis.The Belt and Road(B&R),corresponds to the theme of peace and development,and has exerted a far-reaching influence.B&R news discourses involve rich appraisal resources.In this study,with Appraisal Theory as the analytical framework,the study attempts to make a PDA of appraisal resources in the news reports on B&R.The study on B&R is conducive to exploring the positive values of B&R news discourses,conveying Chinese political stances and extending the profound significance of B&R.Therefore,the study strives to deal with three research questions: 1.What are the characteristics of frequency and distribution of various appraisal resources in the news reports on B&R ? 2.What are the possible reasons for the distribution of appraisal resources ? 3.What are the connotations or implications of B&R according to the distribution of appraisal resources ?Based on the research questions,the study selects 30 pieces of news reports from Belt and Road Portal and Xinhua News Agency as corpus.It adopts UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 as annotation tool.Through qualitative and quantitative methods,the major findings are summarized as follows: 1.B&R news discourses contain abundant appraisal resources.The overall distribution results of appraisal system show that attitude resources take up the largest proportion,followed by engagement resources and graduation resources.Most of the appraisal resources are positive,which highlight the positive meanings of B&R.Among the subsystem of appraisal system,judgement resources occupy the majority of attitude resources.Engagement resourcesare realized by heteroglossic resources,and dialogic expansion far outnumbers dialogic contraction.Force resources mainly make up the graduation resources.2.The distribution of attitude is largely related to news media stances,and domestic or international background.The distribution of judgement is associated with generic features of evaluative news discourse and traditional culture thoughts.The distribution of graduation is influenced by the degree of attitude.3.These appraisal resources indicate traditional Chinese culture values,good national image and profound significance of B&R.In diplomatic activities,it helps China actively convey Chinese attitude,and promote cooperative relations with partner countries to realize common development.The study supplements the insufficiency of CDA,and enriches the application of PDA and Appraisal Theory.It tries to work towards �peaceful linguistics� that Martin advocates.Meanwhile,it provides some linguistic evidence for academic study on B&R,which is conducive for China to better express Chinese attitude.