Intercultural Positive Discourse Analysis On News Reports From Appraisal Theory

This thesis aims to analyze the media reports on China National People’s Congress (NPC)&Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) in2014with reference to Appraisal Theory as the micro guiding framework to interpret the text and Culture Value Orientations Theory as the macro perspective to expound the reporting features in terms of cultural differences of media discourse.The thesis discusses the differences between both Chinese and American reports through Antconc v3.4.1, the free corpus indexing software programmed by Professor Laurence Anthony from Waseda University to add up concordances, key words and word lists in the reports. Based on Appraisal Theory, this thesis attempts to compare and analyze the lexical differences of the discourses. The reports are evaluated on five dimensions propose by Kluckhohn&Strodbeck’s Culture Value Orientations Theory, expecting to interpret and verify that Chinese news report emphasizes more on "positive tendency","panoramic consciousness" and "future-oriented", while American report shows "negative tendency","detail-oriented" and "past-oriented" reporting style. The hypothesis has been verified through text analysis and quantitative statistics.The results manifest that the Chinese report and American report have their own tendencies. On micro discourse construction, Wall Street Journal report uses few inflectional forms as well as specific vocabulary and prefers to describe facts and state others’ viewpoints by using explicit words, leaving the readers with less "blank". Reporters usually adopt multi-voice to display conflicts and comparisons among varied stands of involved persons to cover and blur the reporters’own Judgment, and the reporters insist that the negative influences on the news event should be foregrounded. The report presents an inverted pyramid form. China Daily reports the event in a more panoramic horizon by employing more professional diction, choosing words with more inflectional forms like verbs, adjectives, adverbials, modifiers with positive emotion and implicit intention, using "China" as the first person subject and the monophonic voice to achieve the harmony and conformity of opinions, so as to demonstrate the government’s determination and capability on reform. The report presents a pyramid form. On macro cultural dimensions, because of different understanding on Chinese government reform, Wall Street Journal report focuses on China’s past and present situations, while China Daily report not only addresses the issues but also provides tentative solution, holding optimistic, international and cooperative attitude towards the future. China Daily reporter clearly shows his/her trust on government’s capability and determination by using the word "promise" frequently, but the reporter thinks reform needs time and procedure. From social relationship and engagement perspective, Wall Street Journal quotes official and experts’respective opinions, showing an individual trend. China Daily places "China" as the subject more often to stress the high consistency between nation and individuals in terms of determination and confidence, showing a collectivism trend.