A Corpus-based Contrastive Attitude Analysis Of China’s And American News Reports On RCEP

A large number of prior studies have analyzed news reports based on the Appraisal Theory,but most of them have employed either qualitative or quantitative approaches based on text data from a single source-either from China or western countries,which made it hard to draw a generalizable qualitative conclusion.In view of the above deficiency,this study employed a mixed-method to conduct a contrastive analysis of120 news reports from both China’s and American news media,aiming to reveal their distinct attitudinal meanings.Three computer programs were used for text annotation and attitudinal analysis.UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 was used for attitude annotation and descriptive statistics.KH Coder 3 was used to reveal the semantic theme represented by the attitude resources.SPSS 26.0 was employed to test the differences between China’s news reports and their American counterparts with respect of polarity and subcategories of Attitude-Affect,Judgement and Appreciation.This study found that in both China’s and American news reports,Appreciation resources were the most commonly used among the three subcategories of Attitude,and Judgement accounted for the least.It showed that both China’s and American media paid more attention to the social influences of RCEP.However,there was a significant difference between China’s and American news reports in polarity distribution.In general,China’s news reports were largely dominated by positive linguistic resources,while the American ones by the negative.Specifically,China’s media favored positive Appreciation and Judgment resources in their reports,while the American media preferred negative Appreciation and Judgment resources.This showed that China attached greater importance to the social benefits that RCEP brings to China and other member states,while America tended to regard RCEP as a hindrance to its development.In other words,the distribution of attitudinal linguistic resources suggested that RCEP was viewed in China as an opportunity for global development,while the US focused on its potential negative externality.The application of Corpus Linguistics was conducive to promoting the applied research and development of Appraisal Theory,particularly the Attitude System.Moreover,the research findings may help English reporters compose and appreciate news reports from a critical perspective.