| President Xi Jinping put forward the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013,aiming to build trade and infrastructure networks connecting Asia with Europe and Africa on and beyond the ancient Silk Road routes.It has attracted a lot of attention from different media and researchers since it was put forward.In the reports of 19 th National People's Congress,it was proposed to further deepen and expand reform and opening-up and to make Belt and Road Initiative construction the priority of the policy.Thus,as a major strategy of reform and opening-up,Belt and Road Initiative plays an important role in prompting and creating a new landscape of all-around opening up.Appraisal theory is the most important development and breakthrough of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar.This theory,put forward by Martin and White in the early1990 s,explores the interpersonal meaning in discourse through the analysis of lexical features.The appraisal theory is composed of attitude system,engagement system and graduation system.Within each system,more subsystems are classified further.Although news reports on Belt and Road Initiative have been examined since it was proposed by President Xi,most of the studies put great emphasis on the study of the Initiative itself.Moreover,there are some studies concentrating on exploring the mutual relationship between China and Belt and Road countries.Positive discourse analysis of the news reports on the Belt and Road Initiative from the perspective of appraisal theory is relatively few.Therefore,the author takes appraisal theory proposed by Martin and White as theoretical framework,attempting to make a positive discourse analysis on news reports of Belt and Road Initiative from China Daily.The purpose is to explore appraisal resources and their distributions in news reports,and to further illustrate how the positive meanings are constructed.The main findings of this research are as follows:A great many appraisal resources are used in news reports of Belt and Road Initiative,but their distributions are different.In general,engagement resources take up the largest proportion,then come graduation resources and attitude resources.In addition,positive appraisal resources take up a large majority of the appraisal resources used in the news reports,which indicates that the public both abroad and at home take positive attitude towards andgive great support to the Belt and Road Initiative.Within each subsystem,the distribution of appraisal resources is also different.Generally speaking,in terms of attitude system,the frequency of judgement resources is higher than that of affect resources and appreciation resources.As to engagement system,since news reports are regarded as dialogical,which involves the dialogicality with potential readers,the author mainly focuses on heterogloss resources in this thesis.The results show that dialogic expansion resources obviously take up a higher proportion than dialogic contraction resources.In terms of graduation system,the total number of force resources is higher than that of focus resources.And reporters use a great deal of precise numbers to highlight the benefits brought by Belt and Road Initiative.The present study enriches the research and application of appraisal theory,and provides a new insight for the future researchers to explore the news reports.Meanwhile,the study enables readers to understand news reports in an objective way. |
PDF Full Text Request