An Appraisal Analysis Of Representations Of The Belt And Road Initiative In U.S.Broadsheets

The Belt and Road Initiative has attracted much attention at home and abroad since it was proposed in 2013,on which U.S media has a series of reports.In order to explore how U.S.media construct the Belt and Road Initiative,this study selects some news discourses related to the Belt and Road Initiative in U.S broadsheets as data and thoroughly examines the appraisal resources in these news discourses.There are the research questions: 1)what appraisal resources are used in the U.S.broadsheets? How is the Belt and Road Initiative presented in them? 2)what kind of attitude do the U.S.broadsheets hold toward China and the initiative? And what are the ideological factors behind?Guided by the theory of Critical Discourse Analysis,this study adopts Appraisal theory(Martin & White,2008)as the analytical tool.Twenty news discourses are taken from some U.S.broadsheets,including New York Times,Washington Post,Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal to build a mini-corpus,and a total number of 20609 words are obtained.After a thorough analysis of the appraisal resources used in the corpus,several findings are made.First,there is a large number of appraisal resources in the corpus,including attitude,engagement and graduation resources.To be specific,in attitude system,judgement resources are most frequently used,followed by appreciation resources,affect resources taking up the smallest percentage.In engagement system,dialogic expansion resources outnumber dialogic contraction resources.Acknowledge,entertain and counter resources are most frequently used.In graduation system,force resources take up much more percentage than focus resources.Second,negative resources outnumber negative ones.The U.S.news reporters adopt extensive negative attitude resources to construct China and the initiative.They also use graduation resources to strengthen the negative evaluation of the initiative and engagement resources to lower their responsibility for the negative evaluation.Third,using these resources,the U.S.broadsheets distort China’s motivation and stress other countries’ discontent and predict a dim picture for the Belt and Road Initiative.Such negative attitude can be traced to some prevailing ideas in American ideology,to the belief in American historical mission and the belief in China’s threat,and to American political itself.