| The past years have witnessed the great development of Chinese economy and politics. Within these past years, Chinese Dream, proposed by president Xi Jinping, has exerted a far-reaching influence at home and abroad. The relevant reports are attracting the attention of scholars across different disciplines. From the linguistic perspective, Chinese Dream news discourses involve rich appraisal resources. They imply the orientation of attitude of the appraiser or the social group and deliver positive energy at the same time. From the perspective of national discourse, the language mode in the selected news is of great value for discursive construction. At present, there are some researches on Chinese Dream about its metaphorical features and its constructive process of national identity. On the basis of these previous studies, this study tries to conduct an analysis about the evaluative features of Chinese Dream news discourse, providing a further explanation about the interpersonal meaning. This thesis mainly discusses the realizations and distributions of attitudinal resources, so as to have a reflection on the connotations and social values of Chinese Dream news discourse.Appraisal System, proposed by Martin(2000) to extend the interpersonal meaning in SFL, is adopted as the theoretical foundation of the study. Appraisal Theory(AT) pays attention to the evaluative meaning in discourse which cannot be explained just through meta-functional study. AT leads scholars to have a new try in discourse study. The investigation of affection and attitude of the appraiser has presented a new angle of view for interpersonal study. In the three sub-types of Appraisal System(AS), Attitude, laying a solid foundation for the study of value orientation, lies at the heart position. Generally, the subsystem of Attitude consists of affect, judgement and appreciation. They embody the attitude of the appraiser from different aspects. In the thesis, AT provides an important basis for the study of the whole orientation in the selected discourse, which makes discourse analysis more rational. Because of the common grounds between Appraisal Theory(AT) and Positive Discourse Analysis(PDA), the present research applies AT in the view of PDA to explore the harmonious meaning in news discourses.The present study chooses Chinese Dream news discourse published in China Daily and Xinhua News Agency in the years from 2013 to 2015 as the corpus. In this thesis, the Appraisal Theory serves as the framework and qualitative/quantitative methodologies are adopted. The study aims at finding out the positive discourse meanings in Chinese Dream news discourses. First, this study identifies all the attitudinal resources in specific context in the lexical, syntactic, semantic and metaphorical levels with the help of retrieval and tagging of part of speech. Meanwhile, the construction of the language mode will be investigated. Then, the study uses UAM corpus tool to annotate the corpus several times to get the general distribution of attitudinal resources, the polarity features and the implicit/explicit features. Finally, the study explores the orientation of these news and summarizes connotations of Chinese Dream on the basis of the previous quantitative and qualitative analyses. All these studies indicate how the appraiser expresses evaluations and delivers positive energy.It has been found that the proportion of attitudinal resources is 68.53%. In the subsystem of Attitude, appreciation resources make up a large part, 69.97%. However, the proportion of judgement resources is only 23.11% and the proportion of affect resources is less. All the attitudinal resources are realized directly or indirectly through lexical words, syntax, semantic meanings and metaphors. The positive evaluation mode implies the positive values of Chinese Dream in some way. Although most of the evaluations are positive, several negative appraisal expressions still co-exist in the discourse. However, they usually appear in negative sentences to strengthen the effect of positive evaluation. Both positive and negative evaluations help construct the national discourse mode and interpret the connotations of Chinese dream in terms of a strong, civilized, harmonious and beautiful nation centering on collectivism ideology. Meanwhile, the social values of Chinese dream are also well presented in the study.The present study probes into the attitudinal meanings and values of the selected discourse and explores the ideological meaning of Chinese Dream in news. The research explores the evidence of the construction of a harmonious society in the language level. In the future study, some rhetorical, pragmatic even communicative perspectives will be further adopted to broaden the research field of Chinese Dream. The research findings of the national discourse system at home and abroad will be referred to interpret social values of Chinese Dream in multilevel and multidimensional fields. |
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