Analysis Of India’s English Mainstream Media Reports On Bri From The Perspective Of Storyworld Model

Belt and Road Initiative(BRI)is a grand strategic blueprint put forward by President Xi Jinping in the 21 st century.The recognition and support by countries along the Belt and Road will play a crucial role in the promotion of BRI.As an important neighbor of China,India still holds a skeptical attitude towards BRI.India’s mainstream media,to some extent,are the “public mouth” of the nation.The attitude of India’s mainstream English media news reports on BRI,the possibility of whether they could influence Indian people as well as the strategies they may take in news reports for the audience’s acceptance,are the main focus of this thesis.From the review of previous studies,it was found that India’s mainstream media news reports on BRI covered politics,economy,military,technology and so on.The sentiment of the media was negative in general.This research took India Today as the representative of India’s mainstream media for further analysis.The sample was chosen from an overall consideration including language,media influential power and the availability for Chinese visitors.This study collected all the news reports related to BRI from September 1st 2018 to September 1st 2019,and analyzed the data from the aspects of words,number of comments,domain of topics and sentiment tendency.The following part concentrated on the storyworld model of Herman as the theoretical framework from the perspective of cognitive narratology.In this part,representative samples were chosen for further analysis in order to figure out how news media were reporting news and the process of “reporting(narrator’s perspective)to accepting(audience’s perspective)”.This process was seen as the process of “building up a storyword” between the narrator and the audience.According to the storyworld model,this study analyzed the sample texts from India Today,from the perspective of the five concepts: positioning,embodiment,emotion discourse and emotionology,mind as distributed,as well as qualia.The former four concepts are from the narrator’s perspective,and the last one is from the audience’s perspective.Therefore,when analyzing the feature of qualia,this study used mathematical model to help simulate the reaction of the readers for better understanding the “accepting process” of the audience.The study result showed that India Today mainly focused on the politics and military domain of BRI,and the general sentiment was negative.In addition,the reporting strategies of India’s mainstream media news reports could have influence on people’s mind.In addition,the news reports related to BRI in India Today tried to convey the subjective viewpoint of the communicator to the audience in the form of“fictional reality”.It attempted to describe BRI as “powerful” and “ambitious”.The news reports constructed a certain storyworld to people’s mind by fictionalizing the facts,so as to convey negative attitude.In general,India Today clearly showed negative sentiment to China’s BRI.In addition,by constructing the process of “narrator making up a world——audience accepting the world” under the framework of storyworld,India’s media and Indian people reached the same position towards BRI.In other words,Indian people emerged similar negative sentiment to BRI under the influence India’s mainstream media and the storyworld they had built up in the texts.The strategies of India’s mainstream media news reports could provide reference to China’s foreign publicity.