Stances In NYT News Reports On COVID-19 In China:A Perspective Of The Appraisal Theory

At the start of 2020,the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in Wuhan,which turned into a hot issue of all news media immediately.So far,most linguistic studies on the COVID-19 news discourse are based on the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA)and Cognitive Metaphor,with few from a perspective of appraisal.Thus,based on the framework of Appraisal Theory,this thesis carries out a discourse analysis of the attitude and engagement resources in NYT reports on the pandemic in China so as to mirror the latent stance.This study investigates two issues: first,the distributive pattern of the attitude and engagement appraisals;second,the discourse functions realized by these appraisals.To achieve the objectives above,the author selects 15 NYT reports on the COVID-19 pandemic in China from 23 rd January,2020(the start of lockdown in Wuhan)to 8th April,2020(the end of lockdown in Wuhan)and incorporates them into a database.Then,by dint of UAM Corpus Tool,especially the functions of manual annotation and automatic statistics,attitude and engagement resources in the database are classified into corresponding categories,ready for a quantitative investigation into the distribution as well as a qualitative case analysis of the linguistic effects.Below present the major findings of this thesis.Firstly,concerning the distribution,in affect system,judgement takes up the largest proportion,followed by appreciation and affect in sequence,among which capability,in/security,together with reaction represent the leader of each attitudinal subsystem.In terms of polarity,most attitude appraisals are negative ones.With regard to the engagement resources,dialogic expansion outnumbers dialogic contraction.The former is dominated with acknowledge(attribute)resources while the latter consists largely of counter(disclaim)resources.Secondly,regarding the discourse effects,by dint of attitude resources,the reports give expression to residents’ negative feelings about the virus and government,the “loser” image of the government,and negative impacts of the countermeasures in China,which reflects a biased stance and an attempt to stigmatize the image of China.Moreover,through engagement resources,this newspaper tends to broaden the dialogic scope of the negative propositions about China’s anti-pandemic deeds and restrict that of the positive ones so as to align the audience as its proponents in line with its negative stance towards China.All in all,the attitude and engagement resources both represent the linguistic tools employed by New York Times to show its negative stance towards the COVID-19 in China.Therefore,this study can acknowledge readers of the newspaper’s stance and discursive techniques and strengthen their judgement ability to distinguish right from wrong,critically analyze reports and explore facts.Meanwhile,it offers another perspective to interpret the media’s stance and discursive strategies in the COVID-19 pandemic news reports.