Positive Discourse Analysis Of Youth Of China In The New Era Based On Attitude System

As a public policy statement,White Paper disseminates positions,opinions and attitudes which are related to the country’s image and position and the strive for international discourse power.It receives widespread attention at home and abroad.Previous linguistic studies on the White Paper focused on the translation strategies of spreading the translation texts,but rarely analyzed the interpersonal meaning of the discourse.Youth is the future of the country and carries the important mission.The year2022 marks the centenary of the founding of the Communist Youth League,and on April 21,the State Council Information Office issued its first White Paper on the subject of youth,revealing the country’s attitude towards youth and true image of youth in the new era,which is of great value to foreign propaganda and work guidance.Based on Martin’s Attitude system,the thesis takes the English version of the Youth of China in the New Era of 11,125 words published by the State Council Information Office as the research object,focusing on the practical application of the attitude resources in the White Paper.It explores the characteristics and reasons for the distribution of the resources and reveals positive meanings from positive discourse analysis perspective.Research questions underpinning this study include:(1)What are the characteristics of the distribution of the attitude resources in Youth of China in the New Era?(2)What meanings are conveyed by means of attitude resources in Youth of China in the New Era?(3)How do the attitude resources in Youth of China in the New Era construct the identity of Chinese youth?This study adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to conduct discourse analysis of White Paper through manual annotation,data retrieval and qualitative analysis.Specifically,this study uses the UAM Corpus Tool to repeatedly annotate the attitude resources in the White Paper,so as to reduce the errors caused by manual annotation.At the same time,Martin’s attitude resources categories are adopted to further analyze.On the basis of the distribution of each type of resources,the relevant reasons affecting the distribution of resources will be revealed.Qualitative analysis is adopted to interpret the interpersonal meaning conveyed by the White Paper under the influence of national consciousness.This study reveals the constructed images of youth in the new era through analyzing the attitude resources retrieved from the typical sentences with the help of relationship process of systematic functional grammar.The main results of this study are as follows.Among the attitude resources retrieved from the White Paper,the appreciation resource is the most frequently used.This finding differs from previous evaluation studies related to political texts such as government work report that have found a higher proportion of judgment resources.However,it matches the propaganda goal of this text,thus conveying the State’s recognition of the achievements made by the youth and the important role the State plays in the youth development.Different attitude resources serve for different interpersonal meanings.Apart from the appreciation resource,the affect resource mainly conveys the positive meaning that young people of the new era are confident in the development of the country and can take responsibility of the times more actively and strive for great goals.In the process of selecting evaluation resources,judgement resources are highly used to construct the image of capable and responsible youth in the new era,including four mainstream images of the youth,such as promoter of socialist moral and ethical progress,supporter of high-quality economic growth,participants in the social construction and builders of national rejuvenation.From the positive discourse analysis perspective,this study reveals the positive meaning conveyed in this political text,that is to showcase the real mainstream image of youth and encourage the youth group to contribute their wisdom and strength to building the nation.It also interprets the constructed youth images based on the application of attitude resources to attain the propaganda purpose of White Paper of presenting real youth image and correcting misconceptions abroad.This study introduces the perspective of positive discourse analysis into the study of political texts,expanding the research space of application of the theory.It also provides references for the research path of political texts and implications for improving China’s international communication capacity.