A Contrastive Study Of Attitudinal Resources In The Belt And Road News Discourses Between China And America

The Belt and Road Initiative(BRI)was put forward by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013.Since the initiative is a massive project,it has been reported and discussed heatedly and extensively by major domestic and abroad media.News discourse is usually regarded as an objective and impartial tool to convey information,but it also tends to imply the attitude and position of the government.Besides,news discourse and the hidden attitude and position can construct reciprocally.Attitude system is the core of Appraisal Theory(AT),and it can reflect the appraiser’s attitude toward certain events.It can be further divided into three major categories: Affect,Judgement and Appreciation,each of them can be positive and negative.This thesis focuses on studying the distribution of attitudinal resources in Chinese and American The Belt and Road Initiative news discourses(BRNs)and probing the reasons for the distribution with the help of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model theory.By searching the keywords “The Belt and Road Initiative” and “The Belt and Road” in Chinese and American mainstream media China Daily(CD)and New York Times(NYT)from January 2017 to November 2019,132 pieces of news with almost109803 word in total are selected as samples for this study.UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 is applied as an annotation tool to get statistics for the following analysis.There are two research questions:(1)What is the distribution of attitudinal resources in Chinese BRNs? What is the distribution of attitudinal resources in American BRNs? What are the similarities and differences between them?(2)From the perspective of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model in CDA,what are the possible reasons and thereby explanations for such distribution in the collected Chinese and American BRNs?Through the detailed analysis,the conclusions are as follows.The similarities of the distribution are that both Chinese and American BRNs apply a large number of attitudinal resources and the subsystem Appreciation appears most frequently.However,in Chinese BRNs,the frequency of Judgement is followed by Affect,whereas it is opposite in American BRNs.Besides,Chinese BRNs apply morepositive attitudes while American BRNs use more negative attitudes.The reasons for these similarities and differences refer to power and control,and attitude and position in constructing BRNs in CD and NYT.For one thing,both Chinese and American governments dominate the discursive power in BRNs.For another,two attitudes and positions,“China Rise” and “China Threat”,affect the production of both countries’ BRNs respectively.This thesis broadens the research perspective of analyzing attitudinal resources contrastively and enriches the applied researches of attitudinal resources in news discourses by applying CDA to explore the reasons hidden behind the distribution.Besides,it is conducive for readers to read news discourses more critically and objectively.