| As an important meeting point of the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”,Singapore is playing a more prominent role in the Belt and Road Initiative(hereafter BRI).At present,the objects of domestic BRI news discourse studies are mostly concentrated on Chinese and American media,and few scholars pay attention to the news discourse of Singaporean media.Thus,it is worthwhile making a penetrating study of Singaporean BRI news from a linguistic perspective to understand Singapore’s real attitude towards China’s BRI.Based on the framework of appraisal theory,this study adopts quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze appraisal resources in the 30 pieces of BRI news reports by Singaporean mainstream media from the First and Second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation from the perspective of the subsystems—attitude,engagement,and graduation by using UAM Corpus Tool.It is designed to investigate construction of interpersonal meanings in news discourse,and further trace the degrees of recognition and acceptance of both Singaporean government and people towards China’s BRI,and thus ultimately infer Singapore’s trust degree of China in the field of economic cooperation.Through the analysis of the corpus above,the current research finds: rich appraisal resources are contained in the BRI news reports,of which attitude resources hold the largest shares,followed by engagement resources,and graduation resources occupy the smallest proportion.In terms of attitude polarity,most of the appraisal resources are positive,which implies that Singapore is optimistic and confident about the future of BRI.In terms of attitude system,the judgement resources are most frequently used in the BRI news reports,which demonstrates that Singapore believes that China’s BRI has the certain capability and willpower to propel global economic growth;in terms of engagement system,all the engagement resources are hetero-glossic,and dialogic expansion resources relatively outnumber dialogic contraction resources,and the more use of expansion resources actively opens up the dialogic space and maintain the objectivity of news reports by introducing different voices and viewpoints;in terms of graduation,force resources are used more to intensify the positive attitude towards BRI and persuade the readers to build the confidence in BRI’s development by intensification and qualification.This study can not only help readers to understand the process of constructing interpersonal meanings in news discourses,but enrich the application of appraisal theory,and provide some valuable implications on how to construct a positive image of China in BRI discourses.However,due to the detailed and complex theory,the analysis of each subsystem needs further investigation. |
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