| National image plays an important strategic role in the complex situation of international cooperation and competition.As an important part of the national image,the environmental image is also a vital embodiment of a country’s soft power,which directly affects its politics,economy,diplomacy,and other aspects.As the global climate crisis intensifies,climate change has become an environmental issue of worldwide concern,which reflects the struggle for power and control of discourse.Therefore,it is very significant for China’s international publicity media to tell well the story of China’s climate governance,build a positive environmental image of China and enhance China’s international voice through climate change news reports.In view of this,this study builds up a relevant corpus by selecting China-related news reports on climate change in China Daily from 2011 to 2020,and utilizes this corpus to explore the discursive construction of China’s environmental images in China Daily over the past decade.First of all,this thesis takes the Discourse-Historical Approach(DHA)of Reisigl &Wodak(2009)as its main theoretical basis and thereby explores the themes,intertextual relationships,and linguistic means in the collected news reports through combing with Latent Dirichlet Allocation(LDA)and corpus linguistics(CL).On this basis,the thesis comprehensively summarizes China’s environmental image as presented in the news reports.As China’s official media,China Daily is bound to play the role of the national mouthpiece in the process of international communication.Thus the thesis further probes into the ideologies behind the news reports of China Daily from the historical,social,and political contexts.Finally,this thesis puts forward the suggestions on how to better construct a favorable environmental image of China in climate change news reports in China Daily.The research results show that there are six main topics in climate change news reports in China Daily,namely energy consumption,new energy,government determination,international cooperation,government objectives,and the implementation of the Paris Agreement.The intertextual relationships in the climate change news reports mainly involve manifest intertextual relationships(manifested as discourse representation,hypertext links,and presupposition)and interdiscursive relationships(manifested as blended interdiscursivity,embedded interdiscursivity,switched interdiscursivity and chained interdiscursivity).In addition,by analyzing the linguistic means in the construction of China’s environmental image with the help of corpus analytical tool Ant Conc 3.5.9w,it is found that climate change news reports in China Daily have mainly adopted the linguistic means of nomination,predication,argumentation,perspectivization,and intensification or mitigation.Through the analysis of the themes,intertextual relationships,and linguistic means,the study discovers that the climate change news reports in China Daily have shaped positive environmental images of China as a developing country with active responsibilities,a righteous and kindhearted nation,as well as an advocator and leader in global climate governance.Moreover,China Daily clearly presents four prominent conceptions: information disclosure as realization of enhanced national confidence,the construction of ecological civilization,the vision of a community of life for human and nature,and the vision of a community with a shared future for mankind.This thesis has certain academic and practical values.First,by adopting quantitative and qualitative analysis,this thesis carries out a three-dimensional analysis of DHA through combining the LDA topic model and the corpus linguistics,which consequently avoids the subjectivity of traditional DHA.Second,as a deep analysis of China’s most successful international publicity media,China Daily,it can provide some enlightenment for the international publicity media to better build a positive environmental image of China through climate change news reports. |
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