Constructing China’s Images In The Covid-19 Discourse Of China Daily

Corpus-driven discourse analysis is a recent methodology to study discourses.Covid-19 is the longest lasting and widest spreading global pandemic in the past 100 years.But few studies on the news articles of Covid-19 have been carried out by corpus-driven discourse analysis.By corpus-driven discourse analysis,this study explores the discursive construction of China’s images in the Covid-19 discourse of China Daily.1188 articles on Covid-19 in China Daily from January 22,2020 to May 8,2020 were collected to form the corpus of the study.With Sketch Engine,an online platform analytical tool to help analyze the data,the study seeks to answer two questions: What are the China’s images constructed by the Covid-19 discourse? What are the discursive strategies used to construct the China’s images in the Covid-19 discourse? The findings suggest four points below:Firstly,the image of a cooperative and determined China was constructed through the strategy of perspectivation.This image was constructed through a lot of direct and indirect speeches,quoting President Xi Jinping,spokesperson of Foreign Ministry Geng Shuang and the Director-General of WHO,Tedros,etc.Secondly,the image of a responsible and powerful China was portrayed through the argumentation strategy of topos.The topos frequently used are the topos of responsibility,the topos of usefulness and advantage,and the topos of numbers.Thirdly,the image of a resilient and united China was constructed by using a lot of modal verbs.To construct the image,modal verbs in median-degree of commitment were used to express “possibility” and “willingness or inclination”.Finally,the image of an influential and tenacious China was constructed by using abundant attitudes resources.The attitude resources of affect,judgement and appreciation can be frequently found in the Covid-19 discourse of China Daily.By corpus-driven discourse analysis,this study hopes to promote the development of the interdisciplinary studies.However,this study is only an attempt to a corpus-driven study from a critical perspective,and some limitations are obvious: Only a few prominent keywords were retrieved for analysis,though other keywords may also reflect the ideology of news articles.What’s more,the analysis of the collected corpus is more or less subjective.Despite the analysis tool Sketch Engine was used,some personal opinions,values and understandings might inevitably interfere in the analysis.