National Image Construction In Pyeongchang Winter Olympics From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

In the 1990 s,Appraisal theory was proposed and developed by Martin and his colleagues,which originated from the interpersonal meaning system in the Halliday model to analyze the appraisal meaning in the text.Scholars believe that Appraisal theory is one of the most important new developments in Systemic Functional Linguistics,mainly because it enriches the study of appraisal vocabulary and makes up for the deficiency of original model.Appraisal theory includes three sub-systems:attitude system,engagement system and graduation system.In recent years,Appraisal theory has been widely used in various discourse studies.However,existing studies show that there are few studies combining Appraisal theory with sports news discourse,and there are even less research on the study of national image through sports news reports.Pyeongchang Winter Olympics is regarded as a mega sports event,attracting the attention of people around the world.Media reports become an important platform for shaping the national image.Positive national image will enhance national international influence and national prestige,but negative national image might weaken national international influence and national prestige.World-wide media seizes the opportunity to use all their advantages to create positive or negative national images for their own countries or other countries.This paper selects 60 sports news reports during Pyeongchang Winter Olympics from CNN,The New York Times and China Daily to analyze what kind of national image is created by the appraisal resources and summarize the reporting strategies of these involved reports.This study tries to answer three questions:(1)What are the distributions of attitude resources in these news and how are these attitude resources adopted to construct the national image?(2)What are the distributions of engagement resources in these news and how are these engagement resources adopted to constructthe national image?(3)What are the distributions of graduation resources in these news and how are these graduation resources adopted to construct the national image?With the help of UAM Corpus Tool,this paper adopts the qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyse the data in order to get the distribution proportion by annotating appraisal resources in the research corpus and analyzes how appraisal resources construct the national image through concrete examples.The date analysis generated the following results:Firstly,attitude resources are the most,followed by graduation resources and engagement resources.There are 431 attitude resources,which accounts for 36.22%of the total.There are 424 graduation resources,which accounts for 35.63% of the total.There are 335 engagement resources,which accounts for 28.15% of the total.Attitude resources can convey the true intention and attitude of reporters more directly than engagement resources and graduation resources.Therefore,attitude resources can more accurately shape different national image.Secondly,in attitude resources,the reporters mostly use affect resources to construct the national image.Through the expression of Happiness,Satisfaction and Security,it is easier to arouse readers' resonance,grasp readers' emotions and make them accept the national image created by the reporters.There are 173 affect resources,which accounts for 14.54% of the total.There are 134 judgement resources,which accounts for 11.26% of the total.And there are 124 appreciation resources,which accounts for 10.42% of the total.Sports news reports focus on athletes' performance.The use of affect resources which are used to describe the sports performance can more directly shape positive or negative national image.Thirdly,in engagement resources,the use of dialogic contract resources is higher than that of dialogic expand resources.There are 200 dialogic contract resources,which accounts for 16.81% of the total.There are 135 dialogic expand resources,which accounts for 11.34% of the total.It shows that the reporters tend to reduce thespace for other opinions as much as possible in order to enhance their authority and credibility of the reports.Fourthly,in graduation resources,the use of force resources is much higher than that of focus resources.There are 398 force resources,which accounts for 33.45% of the total.But there are 26 focus resources,which accounts for 2.18% of the total.Reporters portray the national image by quantification and intensification.The high-frequency use of words and expressions expressing number and extent can provide factual basis for the reports and enhance the authenticity of the reports.At the same time,readers are more likely to believe in the national image created by the reporters.The application of appraisal resources helps reporters to create different types of national image.This paper tries to provide a new perspective for the research of sports news reports and enrich the research field of Appraisal theory in China.Finally the study summarized several reporting strategies based on the research results,and shed lights on media workers should make their voices heard on platforms with international influence and build as many influential media platforms as possible in their own countries.In addition,reporters should try to avoid conflicting words and adopt reasonable expressions to construct different national image.