Positive Discourse Analysis Of Chinese News Reports On COVID-19 From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

As a major public health emergency,COVID-19 epidemic poses a threat to the survival and development of mankind,which has attracted great attention from major media.At present,most of the reports on COVID-19 at home and abroad are from the perspective of news communication,such as the guidance of public opinion on news and how to deal with news well,and few studies have been conducted on the linguistic aspects of such news reports based on attitudinal systems.Appraisal Theory is an important theoretical basis of Positive Discourse Analysis,which develops Systemic Functional Linguistics’ interpersonal function,advocates the study of evaluative words in discourse,and pays attention to the views and emotional attitudes expressed by evaluative resources.The attitude system,which is at the heart of Appraisal Theory,is separated into three subsystems: affect,judgement,and appreciation.On a basis of the attitude system of Appraisal Theory,this study chooses 30 news pieces about COVID-19 from the English version of China Daily,a mainstream English language media in China,as the research corpus,and annotates the attitude resources in the corpus with UAM Corpus Tool 3.3.From the perspective of Positive Discourse Analysis,this paper analyzes the attitude resources in COVID-19 news reports,and reveals the positive discourse significance it conveys.The goal of this research is to provide answers to the following three questions: 1.What is the distribution of the three subsystems of the attitude system in COVID-19 news reports of China Daily? 2.What kind of positive discourse meaning does the attitude resources used in COVID-19 news reports of China Daily construct? 3.What positive role does the attitude system play in COVID-19 news reports of China Daily?The findings of this study are as follows: First,the proportion of the three attitude system subsystems in COVID-19 news reports is unbalanced.The highest amount is made up of judgement resources,followed by affect resources,and finally appreciation resources.In addition,positive attitude resources accounted for 87.17%,far exceeding negative attitude resources.Second,in/security resources account for the largest proportion of affect resources,which shows China’s confidence and determination to overcome the epidemic and ensure people’s safety.It also shows that during COVID-19 epidemic period,China paid attention to cooperation with other countries to jointly fight the epidemic.Among the judgement resources,the utilization rate of capacity resources and tenacity resources is relatively high,indicating that the country has a strong anti-epidemic capability and has perseverance and unremitting efforts in the process of fighting the epidemic.In the appreciation system,valuation resources make up the majority of the resources,which shows that China has achieved gratifying results in fighting COVID-19 epidemic.Third,the attitudinal system achieved two major functions in the news reports on COVID-19: enhancing public confidence and shaping the national image as “the guardian of people’s life safety and health”,“the model of world epidemic prevention” and “the contributor of global combat against epidemic”.