Positive Discourse Analysis Of Attitudinal Resources In Chinese English-language News Reports On The 2019 National Day Military Parade

On October 1,2019,the military parade to celebrate the 70^thanniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China was held at Tian’anmen Square in Beijing,which has attracted several news reports from domestic and foreign media.The current studies on the news of the 2019 military parade are in its infancy.Most of the studies are conducted from the perspective of news and media,rarely involving linguistics.There are many positive attitudinal resources in the news reports of the military parade,which express the attitude tendency of the commentators themselves and the social groups they represent.The Positive Discourse Analysis on these attitudinal resources is not only in line with the social reality but also conducive to the interpretation of the positive national image conveyed in the news reports of the military parade.Hence,employing Attitude System,the core of Appraisal Theory,this thesis explores the distributive features,realizations and functions of attitudinal resources in the parade news reports from the perspective of Positive Discourse Analysis.In this paper,30 English news reports on the theme of“2019 National Day Parade”from three mainstream English-language media in China（i.e.China Daily,Global Times and Xinhuanet）are selected as the corpus,spanning from September 30,2019 to October 2,2019.The multi-layer annotation of attitudinal resources in the corpus is conducted with the help of the UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 and the distributive features of attitudinal resources and their three subsystems are elaborated according to the obtained statistics.Based on the qualitative and quantitative statistics,the specific realizations and functions of attitudinal resources are also exemplified and analyzed.It is found that the attitudinal resources used in the parade news include affect,judgement,and appreciation.There are also several distributive features in its subcategories.First,the frequency of appreciation resources is the highest,in which valuation resources rank the first,demonstrating the tremendous social value of the parade.And judgement resources are the second most used resources,of which the proportion of capacity is the largest,indicating the incredible power of the weaponry and the national strength shown in the parade.Affect resources account for the lowest proportion,which implies that the news writers are more objective in their view of the parade without mixing personal emotions.Besides,attitudinal resources in the news reports of the military parade are mainly realized by evaluative lexis,in which adjectives,nouns,verbs and verb phrases are the most frequently used.Last,by using a large number of attitudinal resources,three functions are achieved in the parade news reports,that is,reporting the relevant facts about the impression of the spectators and participants and the power of the weaponry,arousing the resonance and enhancing the national confidence,as well as displaying the image of a powerful,peace-loving and responsible nation.This study provides a linguistic basis for the positive social values and China’s image conveyed in military parade news reports,and it also has certain practical significance for“telling a Chinese story well”,spreading a good Chinese voice and establishing a great image of China.