Positive Discourse Analysis On The 11th Brics Summit News Reports From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

The 11 th BRICS Summit,held in Brasilia in November 2019 around the theme“BRICS: economic growth for an innovative future”,marks a second “golden decade”of the BRICS for economic development.The summit is of special significance,and it attracted extensive media coverage around the world.Many scholars endeavored to view the news reports concerning the summit from political,economic,sociological and journalist perspectives,and few of them assessed the reports from linguistics,Appraisal Theory in particular,perspective.Appraisal system,proposed by Martin(2000),is the extension of interpersonal meaning in SFL.Discourse analysis from the perspective of the appraisal system provides an in-depth exploration of the emotions and attitudes of evaluation subjects behind the language,providing an effective analysis tool for discourse analysis.Taking Appraisal Theory as its theoretical framework and UAM Corpus Tool as an instrument,the present research intends to ascertain the employment and distribution of the appraisal resources,including attitude resources,engagement resources,and graduation resources,in the 60 news reports elaborately sampled from China Daily and Global Times through semantic marking and statistical analysis,in the hope of unveiling the contribution of such resources to constructing positive discourse for the Summit news reports.Principal activities in the present research include:(1)ascertaining the distribution of various categories of appraisal resources in the Summit news reports;(2)exploring positive interpersonal meaning of the appraisal resources in the Summit news reports;(3)exploring the contribution of each resource to constructing a positive interpersonal meaning in the news reports.The results show that a wealth of appraisal resources are used in the Summit news reports,but their distributions are different.Specifically,engagement resources reach43.49%,attitude resources take up 36.76% and graduation resources cover 19.75%.Positive appraisal resources take the greatest percentage in the three categories of appraisal resources,indicating that readers take a positive attitude towards the summit,and agree to the BRICS contribution to strengthening technological innovation cooperation,promoting world economic growth and maintaining global stability with the trend of the times.Viewed from appraisal systems perspective,the frequency of affect resources is higher than that of judgement resources and that of appreciation resources.While the attitude resources reflect people's positive attitude towards human behaviors and events,the engagement system reflects the expansion/contraction of resources,and the graduation system shows the focus of resources.The high frequency of attitude resources indicates people's confidence in the cooperation with the BRICS countries.The percentage of engagement system makes the news reports more neutral,tolerable and convinced,and the percentage of graduation system improves the authoritativeness and authenticity of the news reports.While offering a new perspective for a comprehensive and objective analysis on the Summit news reports,the present research has broadened the fields of application of Appraisal Theory,and might be a useful reference for producing and appreciating the news reports of the same kind in the future.