A Critical Analysis Of The Attitude Resources In The News Reports On Sino-america Trade War In The New York Times

Since Martin's Appraisal Theory(AT)formed in 2000,it has attracted increasing attention from scholars and it is applied in discourse analysis widely.On the other hand,the new round of trade war between China and the United States that broke out in March 2018 was widely reported by The New York Times,an authoritative news media in the United States,which produced a large number of the latest economic news discourses.Therefore,this research aims to explore the attitude and stances on the Sino-America trade war hidden behind the news reports in The New York Times through analysis of the attitude resources based on the Appraisal Theory.On the basis of the research topic,this study aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What attitude resources are employed in news reports on Sino-American trade war in The New York Times?(2)What are the general features of attitude resources in news reports on Sino-American trade war in The New York Times?(3)What are the functions of attitude resources in news reports on Sino-American trade war in The New York Times?In this study,according to the different stages of the trade war's development,the author selected 30 news reports(38580 words)about the Sino-America trade war from The New York times whose issuing dates are in the interval from March 2018 to June 2019.During the research process,the author firstly used the UAM Corpus Tool 3.3m to identify and classify attitude resources in selected news reports,and then made statistics on different types of attitude resources.Afterwards,the author analyzed the features and functions of attitude resources based on the statistics.Finally,the study found that:(1)In terms of types,attitude resources in this study contain a large amount of appreciation and judgment resources as well as relatively few affect resources.(2)In terms of the features,the attitude resources in news reports on the Sino-America trade war in The New York times are mainly manifested in two categories: polarity and explicitness.Of the 1,401 attitude resources,780 are negative attitude resources,which are mainly used to describe the negative impacts of the trade war between China and the United States and to criticize China's trade policies.In terms of explicitness,explicit evaluation is more than implicit evaluation,and implicit evaluations are mainly realized by using metaphor,non-core vocabulary and counter-expectation vocabulary.(3)In terms of functions,through the use of attitude resources with different features,the reporter portrayed China as the main party to initiate the trade war,and also conveyed people's desire to end the trade war as well as showed doubts on Trump's ability to govern.This study is another extension of the applicability of Appraisal Theory in discourse analysis and enriches the application of evaluation theory in discourse analysis of economic news reports.At the same time,through the analysis of language level,we can understand the intention implied in the news reports on the Sino-America trade war in The New York Times more clearly.Therefore,it brings some enlightenment for readers to understand news discourse better.