| The “Belt and Road” Initiative was put forward by President Xi Jinping in September,2013,which aims to jointly build the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”.Since its announcement,it has attracted extensive attention from domestic and foreign media and academic communities.Relevant news reports have been steadily increasing.A large number of attitudinal resources were rich in news reports of the Belt and Road Initiative,which implied reporters’ attitudes and imparts interpersonal meaning to this topic.Accordingly,research on this topic is of significance.In recent years,news discourse analysis has primarily been the focus of discourse analysis.Based on the Attitude System,the current study is aimed at conducting discourse analysis on the attitudinal resources in Chinese and American news reports regarding the Belt and Road Initiative.It intends to explore the distribution differences of attitudinal resources and different political stances between Chinese and American news reports of the Belt and Road Initiative.About 120 pieces of news reports published by authoritative Chinese and American news agencies were selected as research data.With the UAM Corpus Tool 3.0 as the annotation tool,the distribution results are compared and analyzed with the statistical software SPSS.The results are as following:(1)Chinese and American news reports of the Belt and Road Initiative are rich in attitudinal resources in terms of distribution characteristics,and it is shown that appreciation resources took the largest proportion,with judgment resources the least and affect resources lying in between.The distribution of the three negative sub-types of Attitude were significantly different,and there was no significant difference in the distribution of positive judgment and affect resources,while the distribution of positive appreciation resources were significantly different.Most of the appraisal resources in Chinese news reports were positive,but most of the appraisal resources in American news reports were negative.(2)Regarding appreciation resources,Chinese news reports tended to use positive reaction resources and valuation resources to reflect the significant impact and the profound social value,not to mention the economic value of the Belt and Road Initiative.Nevertheless,American news reports often cited positive reaction resources to convey the idea of a “China threat theory”.As for affect resources,Chinese news reports often used positive dis/inclination resources and in/security resources to convey the inclination of other countries to join in the Belt and Road Initiative and their growing trust in China.However,American news reports tended to use negative dis/inclination resources and dis/satisfaction resources to convey the doubts and negations of European countries towards China’s Initiative.Regarding judgement resources,Chinese news reports often employed social esteem resources to express China’s determination and ability,but American news reports often utilized social sanction resources to convey the idea that a rising China is bound to seek hegemony.They accused China of using her Belt and Road Initiative to force small,poor countries to undertake huge loans.The reason why America holds a negative attitude towards China’s Belt and Road Initiative is that it is worried that its international status will be threatened by an increasingly powerful China.So it regards China as an object for prevention and containment.Based on the Attitude System,in order to reveal the different attitudes of Chinese and American media on the Belt and Road Initiative,this thesis conducted a contrastive analysis of the attitudinal resources in Chinese and American news reports to elucidate the reasons behind the different views,thus making a positive contribution to the spread of the Belt and Road Initiative. |
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