| With the fast development of mass media in recent years,online news becomes a major means to obtain information.Political news receives widespread attention as it is closely related to people's immediate interests.Belt and Road Initiative proposed by Chinese president Xi in 2013 arouses a heated discussion.It aims to establish a prosperous economic belt which benefits China and countries alongside the road.Therefore,people keep a watchful eye on related news of its development.Currently,studies on Belt and Road Initiative are mainly conducted from perspectives of journalism and communication,but its linguistic studies are rare.Even linguistic research on political news are mainly conducted from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.The writer finds out that Belt and Road Initiative news which embodies Chinese values contains abundant attitudinal resources,therefore a positive discourse analysis of it not only conforms to the social reality but also is conducive to the interpretation of positive social values conveyed by the initiative.This positive discourse analysis employs the Attitude System,the core of Appraisal Theory,to answer three research questions:(1)What types of positive attitudinal resources are employed in Belt and Road Initiative news from Xinhuanet and what are the ways of realizing them?(2)What are the features of positive attitudinal resources in Belt and Road Initiative news from Xinhuanet?(3)What are the functions of positive attitudinal resources in Belt and Road Initiative news from Xinhuanet?A research method combining both quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis is adopted to analyze thirty pieces of top news on the Belt and Road Initiative with the help of UAM Corpus Tool(Version 3.3).The linguistic materials are downloaded from the English version of the official website of Xinhuanet as it is the most influential online media in China with worldwide influence and the news released are very representative.The initiative is firstly written in the resolutions of 71 st United Nations General Assembly in 2016,which indicates that it rises to a UN strategy and its influence is enhanced.Therefore the time span of the linguistic data ranges from July 2016 to July 2018.Feature coding of attitudinal resources is accomplished on the UAM Corpus Tool,and the subsequent analyses of the features and functions are based on the descriptive statistics obtained from the corpus tool.It is found that firstly,three types of positive attitudinal resources are employed in the selected news,which are affect resources,judgement resources and appreciation resources.Positive attitudinal resources are mainly realized by evaluative lexis in various forms including adjectives,verbs and verb phrases,nouns,adverbs and prepositional phrases.Several features are prominent: first,adjectives and verbs account for an overwhelming proportion;second,positive appreciation resources are mainly realized by adjectives and judgement resources by verbs and verb phrases.Secondly,the distribution characteristics and explicitness of the positive attitudinal resources are presented in Belt and Road Initiative news.There are totally 604 attitudinal resources,559 of which are positive ones that express a clear positive attitude towards Belt and Road Initiative.Appreciation resources account for the largest proportion,judgement resources rank the second and affect resources have the smallest proportion.As for the explicitness of positive attitudinal resources,inscriptions employed are more than invocations.Affect resources express feelings in the most explicit way and judgement resources in the most implicit way.Thirdly,plentiful positive attitudinal resources used in the corpus affirm and testify the necessity of implementing Belt and Road Initiative,which means that the initiative is a right decision for all the participants.China's aspiration to promote common prosperity with countries alongside the road is also conveyed by the appraisal resources,meanwhile a positive image of China is created in the news discourse.The current study enriches the application of attitudinal resources in positive discourse analysis,which analyzes the realizations and features of positive attitudinal resources and provides a linguistic basis for the positive social values conveyed by Belt and Road Initiative.Meanwhile,the thesis facilitates people's better understanding towards political news on the initiative and it is hoped that some implications may be brought to relevant studies in linguistic fields. |
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