| The outbreak of COVID-19 has attracted widespread attention from people around the world and has also brought experience and lessons to governments.During the pandemic,news media play a key role in the information era which will not only maximize their effect on the public cognition,but also can impose through communication channels their viewpoints on the public worldwide.In previous studies,many scholars analyzed political speech and discourse strategies from the perspective of Appraisal Theory and Positive Discourse Analysis.However,there are few studies focusing on the COVID-19.In addition,scholars’ research on Appraisal Theory focuses more on the distribution characteristics of various resources,and there are few deep analyses and elaboration of texts.To bridge such gaps,this study took the comments from China Daily and New York Times on Chinese government during the pandemic as examples and intended to explore the following questions:(1)What are the distributions of the Attitude Resource of AT in the COVID-19 related reports in China Daily and New York Times?(2)What attitude and viewpoints in China Daily and New York Times are expressed through Attitude Resource of AT?(3)What positive meanings are achieved by employing Attitude Resource of AT in China Daily and New York Times?To answer the research questions,a total of 70 news reports were selected from China Daily and New York Times to build a small corpus named Reporters’ Comments.The small corpus was annotated by UAM Corpus Tool manually to explore the distributing features and compared through the analytical tools of SPSS 25.0 to figure out whether there were significance differences in them.After the quantitative method,the present study applied qualitative method to explore the reasons behinds the texts and concluded their positive discourse meanings through analyzing the news reports thoroughly.The results of this study are presented as follows:(1)In general,there are significant differences between China Daily and the New York Times in the use of Attitude Resource of Appraisal Theory.Specifically,in the comparison of subsystems of Attitude Resource,the two newspapers differed little in the use of Affect resource,but significantly in the use of Judgment and Appreciation resources.(2)There are both positive and negative comments on Chinese government but most of them are positive.While appreciating the Chinese government’s effective measures to prevent and control the pandemic,western media still hold prejudices against the Chinese government and show a negative attitude.However,it is hard for them to deny the contribution of China during the pandemic.(3)Many positive meanings are expressed by news reports from China Daily and New York Times.According to China Daily,the Chinese government has a strong ability to prevent and control the epidemic,and the Chinese people have a spirit of self-sacrifice and dedication.New York Times considers that the Chinese people have stable core values and all sectors of the society are united together to make contribution to fight against the pandemic.Based on the result of this study,some implications can be drawn:(1)Theoretically,this study enlarges the applied studies of Appraisal Theory and Positive Discourse Analysis.The analysis of the pandemic-related news reports could provide a new perspective for understanding them.Besides,since Appraisal Theory is complicated and sophisticated,the present study illustrates Appraisal Theory and its sub-systems in a precise way which could help future researchers understand it easier.(2)Methodologically,the present study might help future researchers improve their originality through building a corpus on their own and making their study more comprehensive through combining quantitative method and qualitative method.(3)Pedagogically,some inspirations might be provided for newspaper and magazines teaching classes.Teachers could improve students’ passage interpretation skill through leading them to understand the attitude,stance and opinions of news reporters behind the surface meaning.Mastery of appraisal analytical thinking is conducive to improving students’ reading efficiency. |
