Positive Discourse Analysis Of The Chinese Image Construction From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

With the significant improvement of the soft power and hard power as well as the international status of China,the national image of China has gradually aroused public concern in the international society.The report made by President Xi Jinping at the 19^th National People‘s Congress conveys such a message to the world:China is a peace-loving and responsible country;a country rises from war-torn severity to becoming an even wealthier and stronger nation.The subject of?national image construction‘has always been the focus of scholars at home and abroad,which has a strategic significance to every country.Yet,among numerous literature reference researches,few analytical research on this report was found,most of which was only studied from the perspective of translation;it is of certain significance theoretically and practically that analyzing the positive discourse in the report of the 19^th National People‘s Congress and exploring how the national image is constructed by applying appraisal theory in linguistics.The English version of The Report of the 19^th National People's Congress by Xi Jinping is chosen as the corpus of this study.Quantitative and qualitative analyses are made from three layers--Attitude,Engagement and Graduation of the positive discourse contained in the report,so as to explore the way of national image construction from the angle of linguistics.Firstly,this study attempts to define the appraisal resources based on the meaning and context by means of word frequency searching and manual labeling;secondly,UAM Corpus Tool is applied to make a second label on the text,so as to have a better understanding of the distribution of the appraisal resources and distinctions among them and making specific analysis on the typical examples in different subsystems;finally,all data is integrated and concluded,so that to know how the national image is constructed.From the analyses,we can find that in the English version of The Report of the19^th National People's Congress,the usage of Engagement resources ranks the first,among which the usage of the Hetero-gloss resources is far more frequent than that of the Mono-gloss resources and the usage of the expansion resources is more frequent than that of the Contraction resource.The usage of negative words has actually deepened the positive meaning of the words.The usage of Attitude resources ranks the second,among which the use of Judgment resources is on the top,followed by Appreciation resources,while affect resources are seldom used.The last category is Graduation resources.The usage of force and focus has strengthened the positive meaning of the discourse,yet the use of force is far more than that of focus.Through the positive discourse analysis of the English version of the report,we can understand that the use of different resources can clarify attitudes,effectively convey information,and realize the construction of national image.