Positive Discourse Analysis Of The Belt And Road Initiative English News Reports From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As a new perspective of discourse analysis,positive discourse analysis has been used by more and more scholars.It is mainly concentrated in politics,economy,people’s livelihood and other fields.As a supplement to critical discourse analysis,discourse analysis advocates from the perspective of construction,hoping to promote the spread of Chinese ideas through discourse analysis and further enhance China’s influence in the world.From the perspective of positive discourse analysis,this study analyzes the language resources contained in the Belt and Road Initiative news discourse,and reveals its function and significance.Developed from the study of interpersonal meaning in systemic functional linguistics,evaluation theory focuses on attitudinal negotiation,emotional intensity,and various ways of indicating values and allying readers in a discourse.Focus on attitudinal negotiation,emotional intensity,and the various ways in which values are expressed and readers are aligned in the discourse.It consists of three subsystems:Attitude,Engagement and Graduation.Attention to these words can reflect the speaker’s attitude,point of view,position,etc.Through the analysis and evaluation of these languages,it is helpful to reveal the purpose of the speakers.This study is based on appraisal theory from the perspective of positive discourse segmentation.Qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis are used to combine corpus and positive discourse analysis.This study studies the construction process of positive attitude of evaluation subjects in English news discourse of the Belt and Road Initiative.It proves that the meaning of a large number of positive words is reflected in the positive evaluation language of the Belt and Road Initiative.This will clarify China’s firm position on safeguarding world peace and development.The main findings of this study are as follows.First,under the appraisal theory,the frequency of use of engagement system was the highest.Second is the attitude system,judgment system accounted for the smallest percentage.Through the use of a variety of attitude resources,express their own feelings and attitudes to make the news attitude emotion more obvious.Under the engagement system,journalists explicitly quote or report what others say to maintain objectivity.At the same time,the cognition and interaction of different voices can also maintain the objectivity of news reports and make them more convincing.In graduation system,force resources are far more than focus resources,used to raise or lower the volume of the author’s or speaker’s voice,to sharpen or soften categories of people or things.All in all,this study is an attempt to analyze English news discourse positively with the theoretical tool of appraisal theory.It opens a new perspective for positive discourse analysis of English news discourse and has certain enlightenment for discourse analysis in the future.