| China’s National Day military parades have long been the focus of the medias around the world. The Victory Day military parade in 2015 once again came under the spotlight of the medias, especially the western medias. By far, there have sprouted up many comparative studies on China’s military parades in the academic field. However,the precious studies are mostly horizontal comparisons of the reports from different newspapers on certain military parade, few of which is conducted from the chronological perspective. This thesis is then a tentative try.Altogether fourteen reports on China’s military parades are selected from The New York Times, spanning from 1949, the very establishment of People’s Republic of China, to 2015, the Victory Day military parade.Based on the attitude values of the Appraisal Theory, the body part of the thesis unfolds a critical analysis on the 14 reports collected from The New York Times. The changes of the reports of China’s military parades, their patterns as well as the changing trend of The New York Times’ reports of China’s military parades reflected, with the help of the Corpus Tool, are then analyzed in detail,consisting of both overall analysis of the data and the comparative analysis of per sample. Meanwhile, the American ideology and Sino-US relation are further discussed after sample analysis of the attitude values to find explanations for the possible changes of The New York Times’ coverage of China’s military parades from the social and cultural perspective and to further explain the relationship between discourse and social practice.According to the statistics analysis of the reports, judgment enjoys the highest preference in attitude system with appreciation and affect secondary to it. Among the subcategories, insecurity, tenacity, valuation and reaction values appear more in the reports in 1950s, while capacity enjoys main position in all of the 14 reports and the focus of the reports varies from the Soviet Union and Taiwan issues to China’s military power and government policies, which is highly related with the ideology difference between China and America and the improvement of China’s social and historical position in the world.By so doing, we can hopefully enrich the application of attitude values to Critical Discourse Analysis and provide the readers with a different viewpoint when reading newspaper reports. |
