A Contrastive Study Of The Reports On Belt And Road From Chinese And American Newspapers

Belt and Road Initiative is the Chinese national top-level strateg initiative.President Xisuccessively put forward to buliding Silk Road Economic Belt and 21 st Century Maritime Silk Road during a visit to central Asia and southeast Asia countries in September and October of 2013,which has made great influence on the international society.The initiative involves more than 60 countries.There are many experts and scholars conducting the research from different fields.Chu Yin,Gao Yuan(2015)studied three problems of Belt and Road strategic positioning;Shen Xianjie et al.(2014)studied the significance of Belt and Road initiative from macroeconomic perspective;Zhu Guisheng,Huang Jianbin(2016)discussed American mainstream media opinion on Belt and Road from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.But there are few comparative analysis of Chinese and American news reports on the Belt and Road Initiative based on the Appraisal theory.The Appraisal theory is developed by Martin and Rose based on Hallidy's theory of interpersonal system,and it focuses on the various attitudes that can be negotiated in the discourse.According to Martin's Appraisal theory,the appraisal system is divided into three subsystems: attitude,engagement and graduation.With the help of statistical software UAM Corpus Tool,this thesis collected60 news reports on Belt and Road from the Chinese and American newspapers,and the corpora range from January 2017 to the end of 2017.The corpora was comparatively analyzed from the perspectives of attitute,engagement and graduation within Appraisal theory,which aims to reveal the similarities and differences of distribution of the appraisal resources as well as the ideology behind these appraisal expressions.This thesis draws the following conclusions through comparative analysis: 1)the corpora of the two groups use a lot of attitude resources.But within attitude resources,American newspapers tend to use the negative emotional resources in affective resources,worrying Belt and Road Initiative may affect the development of the countries along the route.While Chinese newspapers are inclined to use appreciation resources to mainly report the significance and social value of Belt and Road Initiative;2)As for the engagement system,this thesis only studies the heterogloss resources.American newspapers employ more dialogic-contration resources,showing that they tend to hold on to their own view and exclude the outside voice,while Chinese newspapers use more dialogic-expansion resources and is good at accepting the different outside voices.This may also reveal the differences between Chinese and Western cultural backgrounds and values;3)In the graduation system,two corpora used more force resources to strengthen or weaken the description of attitude and engagement resources.Two groups of corpora are not using “soften” in the focus system.In news reports,we should avoid using soften gradation resources to express attitude and position clearly.Through a comparative analysis of news reports on Belt and Road,the conclusion of this thesis is helpful to improve criticism consciousness of English learners in reading news,which enables them have a comprehensive understanding of the author's attitudes,opinions and the underlying ideology.