Apositive Discourse Analysis Of The Forum On China-Africa Cooperation News Reports From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

Positive discourse analysis(PDA)is the development of the long-advocated“critical” and “negative” ideas in discourse analysis into the “positive” and“affirmative”.Although some have studied news reporting at home and abroad,they primarily focus on its framework,seldom positive analysis of appraisal resources in media reports based on appraisal theory.The present study the analysis of the positive resources since they have provided a wealth of resources for PDA in the news reportages on FOCAC.This analysis is conducted by complying with the appraisal theory(AT)to reveal the distributions of positive resources of attitude,engagement and graduation and how they facilitate the positive meaning of news discourse and vocabulary,while highlighting how the news of FOCAC facilitates the partnership between China and Africa and the significant implication of establishing a community with a shared future for all mankind..Findings show that there are totally 1,699 appraisal resources among the three subsystems in the 30 news reports of FOCAC.Of them,the most distributed are graduation resources accounting for 769(54.26%),which indicates that over half of evaluative meanings are conveyed through graduation resources.Graduation is usually adopted to adjust attitude and engagement to be high-scaling or low-scaling,by which the authors can magnify or blur their feeling.The extensive use of graduation resources fully reflects that semantic graduation is central in the reports on the events of FOCAC where it is mostly used to reflect that China-Africa relations are more stressed.Attitude resources are comparatively more used occupying 569(33.49%).Attitude resources can better realize the communicative function,enable the writers or speakers to show their hidden intersubjective evaluation in the discourse,and to arouse the resonance of potential readers.Because of the strong subjectivity of the attitude system,the author likewise collected the distribution of negative resources to highlight andcompare with the positive ones.Results demonstrate that of the total 569 attitude resources,511 are positive but only 58 negative,occupying 89.91% and 10.19% respectively.As attitude discourses are to express one's own attitude and stand,the much larger percentage of use of the positive attitude resources implies that the news reporters appreciate very much the forum and held a quite positive attitude on the China-Africa relationship and cooperation.Engagement resources distributed the least,taking up 361(21.25%).Engagement resources help authors or speakers achieve interpersonal meaning by expressing the degree to which they have invested in the proposition or by aligning potential readers with the values being promoted.This use of engagement resources implies that the writers or speakers not only themselves appreciate China-Africa cooperation but also try hard to align the readers and audience by the way to negotiate interpersonal communication or conceptual meaning.The thesis is split into six chapters.In the first chapter,the research backdrop,goal and sense of the analysis are introduced.The second chapter is literature review,including the studies of AT,PDA and news on the FOCAC.The third chapter elucidates the concepts and contents of positive discourse analysis and appraisal theory to lay a relevant basis for the analysis.In the fourth chapter,the research design is introduced.In chapter five,the findings are presented and analyzed.The sixth chapter is the concluding part.