A Study On 'China Image' In Bangkok Post From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

In recent years,with the overall improvement of comprehensive national strength,China develops rapidly,more and more foreign media begin to pay much attention to China.China image presented by foreign media has gradually become a research focus.Thailand is China's fourth largest trading partner among ASEAN countries and it is an important country under the Belt and Road Initiative.China and Thailand are closely cooperated in the fields like economy,politics,culture,education,tourism and so on.Reports on China in Thai media will undoubtedly reflect the attitude of Thai government and people towards China,and research on these reports will also enable China to better understand itself and cooperate more effectively with Thailand.Martin and his colleague White proposed Appraisal Theory in their book the Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English.Attitude,Engagement and Graduation are three interacting domains of Appraisal Theory applied in discourse analysis.It is one of the systematic tools which construe the writers/speakers' attitude or stance objectively in-depth from the lexical level.Thus,the paper attempted to analyze the image of China presented in Thai media(taking Bangkok Post as an example)under the theoretical framework of Appraisal Theory.The reason why Bangkok Post was chosen is that it is one of the three most influential English newspapers in Thailand,and it is also the longest-running English newspaper in Thailand.The research corpus was downloaded from the database EBSCO.It made up of fifty-nine pieces of news.Those texts cover different topics as tourism,politics,economy,culture,technology etc.With the help of UAM Corpus tool,this research endeavored to answer the following questions:(1)What appraisal resources are employed in the Bangkok Post and what are their distribution characteristics?(2)How those appraisal resources are adapted to present China's country image?(3)What kind of China's country image is presented in the Bangkok Post?The result showed that,(1)plenty of appraisal resources have been employed in Bangkok Post,Attitude resource and Engagement resource were mainly used in Bangkok Post,while the Graduation resource was relatively less.(2)In Attitude system,positive and invoked Attitude resource were much more than the negative and inscribed Attitudes resources.In Engagement system,dialogical expansion resources exceeded dialogical contraction resources.It means Bangkok Post adapted a large number of non-authorial voice to make it more objective and it can easily arouse common empathy to align the readers.In Graduation system,Bangkok Post applied Force resources to intensify China's positive image.(3)It can be inferred from the data that Bangkok Post mainly portrays China in a positive way.China was considered as: advancing in science and technology;country being strong and people being rich;loving peace;a responsible world power.Negative country image reflected in Bangkok Post is: some outbound tourists' quality remains to be improved.A topic on which presented both positive and negative images is: maritime dispute.