A Semantic Prosody Study Of China’s Energy Image In U.S. Broadsheets

Semantic prosody is an extension and expansion of the collocation study. Semanticprosody, an expression of speakers’ supportive or oppositional attitude to a topic, can beroughly classified into three categories: positive, negative and neutral. In recent years,scholars are exploring semantic prosody study in the field of language teaching and mediadiscourse analysis gradually, but research about China’s national image, in particular, China’senergy image is unusual.As globalization speeds up, communication and connection among different countriesbecome closer and closer, and newspaper has become an important channel for people toknow other countries. China’s national image has not been optimistic all the time. The mainreason is that the US-led western countries take the global media advantages to demonizeChina with a lot of strong negative ideological reports. In the past20years, with the rapiddevelopment of economy in China, the demand for energy is increasing at an amazing rate. Inthe background of the globalization, China’s energy security is related to the world’s energysecurity. However, the international media environment has been changing dramatically andbecomes more complex after the success of the Olympic Games in Beijing, Obama becomingPresident of America, and global financial crisis. What changes of China’s national imagehave taken place in U.S. mainstream media and do the unfair stereotypes still exist? What isChina’s energy image in U.S. broadsheets? These issues must be studied, because it has greatpractical significance for building a positive national image and public diplomacy.We use the Lexis Nexis academic database, and select “China” as the key word in thecollection of China-related reports in three U.S. broadsheets (the New York Times, WashingtonPost, and the Los Angeles Times) from September18,2008(the Beijing Olympics closingtime) to December31,2010, establishing a dedicated corpus which contains approximate8.08million words. The present thesis focuses on the colligation, collocation and semanticprosody of CHINA contextualized with the word ENERGY to show China’s energy image.With the aids of the computer software AntConc3.2.1, the thesis examines the overalldistributions and the frequencies of CHINA with positive, negative and neutral prosodies toconclude China’s image in energy. Through the analysis of400concordance lines collocations, colligations and semanticprosody, we find that CHINA has a strong negative prosody. Among the400concordancelines in the corpus, there are256(64%of the total occurrences) of negative semantic prosody,104(26%of the total occurrences) of positive semantic prosody and40(10%of the totaloccurrences) of neutral semantic prosody. The two colligations can be summarized as“CHINA+is+N/Doing/Adj” and “CHINA’s+N”.The research finds that reports concerning China’s energy affairs in Americannewspapers do not represent the reality objectively and neutrally. The United States believesthat the increase of China’s energy consumption and rapid development of clean energy posea huge threat to the United States. The United States is worrying about the fact that Chinamay become the leader of the world in clean energy and renewable energy, which will shakethe status of the U.S. global hegemony. Meanwhile, the United States reports that China’senergy-saving goals and emission reduction targets are just to deceive the public. China canhardly achieve energy efficiency goals.This thesis makes a tentative analysis of energy news, a genre which is rarely researchedin the field of semantic prosody, and its contributions lie in analyzing the linguistic strategiesfrequently employed in energy news, helping readers to have a better understanding of thehidden ideologies in the news and improving readers’ critical reading ability. Besides, it isalso helpful for the government to enhance external publicity of China’s image in energy.