Attitudinal Analysis Of English News Discourse In Different Construction Stages Of The ECRL Project In Malaysia

The east coast railway project(ECRL project)is the largest economic and trade cooperation project between China and Malaysia.Its construction not only meets Malaysian interest appeal for economic development but also conforms to China’s “One Belt and One Road” initiative to actively develop economic cooperation partnerships with countries along the routes and jointly build a community of shared interests with economic integration.This thesis takes the news report of The New Straits Times about the project of ECRL of Malaysia as the research corpus,and adopts the system of attitude in Appraisal Theory prosed by Martin and White as the theoretical framework,employs the UAM Corpus Tool as research Tool.Mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative,this thesis analyzes the attitudinal resources of news about ECRL project,discusses the hidden attitude behind linguistic resources,and how attitudes are presented through language.The study findings are as follows:(1)Malaysia holds a positive attitude towards the project in all three stages of the project,and does not give up the project completely even in the shutdown stage.(2)In terms of the allocation of attitudinal resources,resources of appreciation take up the highest proportion,followed by resources of judgment and resources of affect,which are relatively balanced.(3)The presentation of language in attitude can be specifically divided into three parts,which can be explained from entity of language,main content and language vocabulary.Entity: there are multi-entities in the construction stage and single entity in the resumption stage.Main content: the language content in the construction stage focuses on the benefits brought by the project,the language content in the shutdown stage stresses on the efforts made by the Malaysian government to reduce the construction cost of the project,and the mian content in the resumption stage emphasizes on the necessity of the project construction.Language vocabulary:explicit vocabulary is employed in the construction stage and the resumption stage,while implicit vocabulary is used in the shutdown stage.From the perspective of the Appraisal Theory,this thesis studies the characteristics of the distribution of attitudinal resources in each stage of project construction and interprets the hidden attitude behind linguistic resources.It not only expands the research scope of Appraisal Theory and enriches the research object of Appraisal Theory,but also is beneficial to understand Malaysian economic demands and cooperative expectations,and provides a new research perspective and inspiration for the future economic and trade cooperation between China,Malaysia,and Southeast Asian countries.