A Study Of The Attitudinal Resources And National Identity Construction In The News Reports On "The Belt And Road" Initiative Of Chinese Media

Since President Xi proposed “the Belt and Road” initiative in 2013,the relevant news reports have attracted wide attention of scholars both at home and abroad.Relevant reports published by Chinese media are an effective channel for China to publicize its national identity and display its national image.The selection and application of the language resources in news discourse determines the construction of national identity.At present,the study of B&R news discourse mainly focuses on the analysis of the relationship between language,power and ideology from the perspective of criticism.Few scholars analyze the relationship between language and national identity from the non-critical perspective.Based on this,this paper takes the attitudinal resources as the subject,and combines the identity theory in constructivism to analyze Chinese news reports on B&R.It aims to explore what kind of national identities are constructed through the use of the language resources.Based on Halliday's Systemic-functional Grammar(1985)and Martin's Appraisal Theory(2000),this thesis systematically analyzes the characteristics and distribution of attitudinal resources.At the same time,combining with the national identity theory in Alexander Wendt's constructivism(1994),this thesis makes discourse analysis and text interpretation to examine the multiple national identities constructed by Chinese media through media discourse.The present thesis selects 30 pieces of news reports from the official website(English version)of Belt and Road Portal,China Daily and Xinhua News Agency as corpus.Moreover,the time span is from 2016 to 2018.Through qualitative and quantitative methods,the thesis aims to investigate what kind of different national identities are constructed by Chinese media through the use of attitudinal resources.Then answer the following questions:1.From the perspective of System-functional Linguistics,What attitudinal resources do Chinese media adopt in “the Belt and Road” news reports?2.What are the distribution characteristics of these attitudinal resources in Chinese news reports on “the Belt and Road” Initiative?3.What kind of national identity do Chinese media construct in “the Belt and Road” news reports?The results show: firstly,Chinese media use abundant attitudinal resources in “the Belt and Road” news reports.Meanwhile,multiple national identities are constructed by Chinese media.Modalization,modulization,affect,judgement and appreciation are all adopted in B&R news reports.Secondly,judgment resources are the most frequently used in B&R news reports,which up to 30.95%.Modulization ranked second,accounting for 25.11%.Appreciation accounted for 21.21%,ranking third.Modalization and affect resources are less used,which make up 7.90% and 14.83% respectively.Thirdly,Chinese media construct six kind of national identities through the selection and application of attitudinal resources.Namely,the advocate of a community of sharer future,the firm maintainer of international order,the active contributor to global development,the reliable and responsible cooperator,the helper of the people of the countries along the route and the sharer of interests and opportunities.The study enriches the empirical study of modality and attitude system in media discourse.Furthermore,it provides a new direction for discourse analysis from the perspective of political theory.Finally,it has some implications for news writing and the understanding of implicit meaning of news.