Language Choice And Stance:the Attitudinal Resources In News Reports On China's 70th WWII V-Day Military Parade

Appraisal is the semantic system of linguistic resources that can express writers'/speakers'opinion, attitude and stance (Martin,2000), which is comprised of three such interrelated main systems as attitude, graduation and engagement, all of which can be further sub-categorized. Attitude is concerned with feelings, including emotional reactions, judgments of human behaviors and evaluation of things. The linguistic resources expressing people's feelings, judgments and appreciations in discourses are called attitudinal resources in this study. Though all news media declare that their reports are objective, their comments are just and their opinions are neutral, the language choices in producing news discourses reflect their attitudes and stances. As a typical kind of public discourses, news discourses have been an important research object of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), a social-oriented approach to discourse studies which concerns itself with the interrelationship between discourse, power and ideology and attempts to examine the ideologies and power relations behind language choices by analyzing the linguistic representations and investigating the social context in which discourses are produced, distributed and consumed, so as to disclose the impact of ideology and power relations on discourse construction and the retroaction of discourses towards ideology and power relations.Taken CDA and attitude system as theoretical bases, this study selected 54 news discourses reporting China's 9.3 V-day parade from four representative news agencies in the world (i.e. Xinhua, AP, AFP, and Reuters), and analyzed and compared the distribution of attitudinal resources and constructed images in both China's and western news discourses so as to reveal the embedded ideologies in the news discourses and find out how discourse producers construct national images and express ideological stances via deliberate language choices.The study has found that in western news discourses judgment is the most eminent attitude type, followed by affect and appreciation, which is basically in line with the previous attitudinal studies on China and English hard news. While in the China's reports, appreciation appears to be the dominant attitude type, followed by judgment and affect. In both Chinese and western media, the most frequent appraised items include China's parade, troops cut and arms in display, and the most frequent appraisers can be roughly divided into such five sets as China's mainland, Taiwan of China, the West, Japan and the foreign participating countries. When the appraised items are related to China, more positive attitudinal resources are found in Chinese media, while in western media it's the other way around. China's national images are constructed positively via attitudinal resources and images of Japan and the West appear to be negative in China's reports, while in western media China's national images are defamed and the images of the West are sublimated. The differences in the distribution of attitudinal resources and the constructed national images in Chinese and western media are closely related to the ideologies and power relations (or rather national interests) embedded in news discourses.The above-mentioned findings demonstrate that however just, objective and neutral news discourses boast themselves to be, they are still bound with certain ideological stances. Discourse producers can express their stances and disseminate and strengthen their defending ideologies, power and interests via attitudinal resources (explicit or implicit), which will exert a subtle influence on readers' subjective judgments. In this way, the media can influence or even manipulate readers' minds. AP, AFP, and Reuters, as representatives of the global mainstream media, guide the world public opinions; however under the influence of the deep-rooted "Cold War" mindset and "China Threat" theory and driven by different national interests, their reports on China's V-day parade are not complete, or even distorted, and they uglify China's national images and contain some ideological bias against China.To some extent, this research further affirms some crucial notions in CDA such as "language is a social practice" and "language, ideology and social power are inseparable". Besides, it also verifies the feasibility of the employment of Appraisal Theory to the critical studies of news discourses and the critical interpretation of language choices and ideological stances. The study enlightens the Chinese English learners to improve their critical reading awareness and abilities so as to be more sensitive to the embedded ideological bias hehind the langauge choices in discourses, thus providing some implications for foreign language teaching and learning as well as textbook compilation.