| News reports can reflect social facts.The news values of news events are discursively constructed in the news discourse.So analyzing how news values are constructed in the news discourse can help us to better understand the social facts behind it.Discursive News Values Analysis(DNVA)allows researchers to systematically analyze how news values are constructed or foregrounded through discourse.Confucius Institute has a history of 15 years so far.According to Hanban,by the end of 2018,29 Confucius Institutes have been established in the UK,more than any other country in Europe.With the method of DNVA,this thesis intends to analyze how the news values of Confucius Institute have been discursively constructed by British mainstream media in three different stages.For analyzing,first,the development of Confucius Institute in the UK is divided into three stages and the news reports of each stage will be annotated by using UAM corpus tool 3.0.Then,according to the annotation results,the construction of news values by British mainstream media on Confucius Institute in each stage will be analyzed by applying Bednarek and Caple's DNVA framework.At last,a comparison will be made among the news values foregrounded in different stages to find out the similarities and differences among them.The results indicate that,all of the ten news values have been constructed in the three different stages.While,the three most foregrounded news values in different stages are different.(1)In the initial stage,they are Superlativeness,Timeliness,and Proximity.Superlativeness is mainly constructed by quantifiers,comparisons and intensifiers;Timeliness is mainly constructed by temporal references and present/present perfect;Proximity is mainly constructed by explicit references to place or nationality near the target community.(2)In the reflective stage,they are Negativity,Superlativeness and Timeliness.Negativity is mainly constructed by descriptions of negative behavior and negative lexis;Superlativeness is mainly constructed by quantifiers,comparisons and intensifiers;Timeliness is mainly constructed by temporal references.(3)In the new stage,they are Superlativeness,Positivity and Eliteness.Superlativeness is mainly constructed by quantifiers,comparisons and intensifiers;Positivity is mainly constructed by positive lexis and descriptions of positive behavior;Eliteness is mainly constructed by recognized names and high-status role labels.There are some similarities and differences among the three most foregrounded news values in the three different stages.(1)Superlativeness has been foregrounded in all stages,which indicates the development of Confucius Institutes is valued all the time.(2)Timeliness has been foregrounded in the initial and reflective stages.While in the initial stage,it's mainly related to the setup of new Confucius Institutes in Britain,in the reflective stage,it's mainly related to the closure of some Confucius Institutes in the US/Canada.(3)Proximity has only been foregrounded in the initial stage.In this stage,Confucius Institute is unfamiliar to the British public,Proximity has been established to discursively construct the unfamiliar Confucius Institute as geographically or culturally near to the British people.(4)Negativity has only been foregrounded in the reflective stage.It is mainly established by the closure of Confucius Institute in the US/Canada and British people's concern over such things.(5)Positivity and Eliteness have only been foregrounded in the new stage.They are both related to President Xi Jinping's successful state visit to Britain.Besides,Positivity is also related to the British people's desire for Chinese after the Brexit.This thesis studies news values from an interdisciplinary perspective,which is beneficial for news readers,linguistic learners and journalism majors.By analyzing how the news values of Confucius Institute are discursively constructed,this study can help people better understand the coverage and development of Confucius Institute in the UK in different stages and learn how to establish expected news values by using linguistic devices.Furthermore,this study adopts the newly-introduced Discursive News Values Analysis method from the foreign academic field to enrich domestic studies in this field,in hope of encouraging more researchers to apply DNVA to do further study. |
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