With the increasing growth of China’s economy and international influence,the newly developed model of economy and policy has aroused extensive attention around the world since the People’s Republic of China adopted the reform and opening up policy.Related topics such as“Chinese Model(中国模式)”“China’s Road(中国道路)”“China’s Experience(中国经验)”“China’s Story(中国故事)”have,therefore,provoked heated debate globally.Ramo points out in the report of Beijing Consensus that Chinese Model is not only suitable for China,but also a model for other developing countries who seek for economic growth.Africa,as home to the largest number of developing countries,is considering a possible alternative to achieve economic and social advance through learning from Chinese development road and experience.As a space where discourse,power and knowledge interweave,media constructs and reflects social life.Therefore,news media reports base themselves on social ideology,and influences the public at the same time.Critical Discourse Analysis,with the focus of explanation of the interrelationships among language,power and society,is often integrated with corpus linguistic.This integration can significantly lower analyst’s subjective preconceptions,enables a comprehensive study at different levels in a specific text,and enhances the persuasion of the conclusion discourse by generating and reproducing media discourse.In order to examine African cognition and attitudes towards Chinese Model,this paper attempts to conduct a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis,based on the corpus of44 news reports on Chinese Model from 2000 to 2017 in African mainstream newspapers.This research,first,investigates the collocates of Chinese Model to explore the semantic relations between the node word “model” and its collocates.Second,concordance lines serves to examine the contextual information and linguistic co-occurrence around the node word“model”;and based on the further analysis of its semantic prosody around “model”,pragmatic meanings and potential attitudes hidden in the news discourse are discussed.Third,transitivity analysis is to extract the clauses with “model” indicating Chinese Model to reveal the relationships between language and ideology in media discourse.Finally,through examining the use of modal verbs,the varying degrees of inclination,probability,responsibility and usuality indicating the underlying attitudes and cognition that African reports hold towards Chinese Model are investigated.The research findings suggest that Chinese Model is constructed not only as unique developmental experience of China but also as a favorable economic-political model worthwhile for Africa to draw on.Regardless of some negative coverage,the majority of reports take favorable and positive attitudes towards Chinese Model,which implies African people’s trust and confidence on it and its competitiveness in local Africa compared with other development models,and also their sincere zest of promoting local economic development and social advance.Meanwhile,a few negative reports somewhat reflects African people’s uncertainty toward whether China’s development model and experience are compatible locally.Moreover,social and cultural background of Africa and China contributes to the public perception and construction of Chinese Model in Africa.This paper may enrich the study on media image of Chinese Model and shed light on win-win cooperation between China and Africa. |