An Appraisal Analysis Of Discursive Representations Of Human Community With A Shared Future In The South African English-language Newspapers

“Human Community with a Shared Future” is the core concept of China’s global governance.The acceptance of this concept by countries around the world is related to China’s practice of effectiveness in leading global governance.The existing studies mainly focus on the dissemination of the “Human Community with a Shared Destiny” in Europe and the United States and Japan and South Korea,but there are few studies on African countries and fewer studies on the attitude and stance of African countries towards it.This research adopts corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis to collect foreign reports published in South African English-language newspapers from March 2013 to December 2021 from the online newspaper database Lexis Nexis,with the attitude system of Appraisal theory,an extension of interpersonal metafunction within Systemic Functional Linguistics,as the discourse analytical framework,and UAM Corpus Tool3.0 and Wordsmith 8.0 as tools for annotation to explore qualitatively and quantitatively the South African English-language newspapers’ discursive representations of “Human Community with a Shared Future” and its evaluative discursive strategies indicative of the welcoming stance and unwelcoming stance.The following interrelated questions are addressed:(1)What is the general stance taken by the South African English-language newspapers towards the discourse of HCSF?(2)What are the evaluative discursive strategies employed to construct the welcoming stance?(3)What are the evaluative discursive strategies employed to construct the unwelcoming stance?The findings of the present study are summed up as follows: Firstly,South African English-language newspapers generally hold a very positive welcoming stance,with a small proportion of unwelcomeness.The frequency of positive attitudinal resources is significantly higher than that of negative attitudinal resources,and the welcoming stance is expressed mainly in an explicit way,while the unwelcoming stance is largely in an implicit way.Subsequently,three positive discourses convey welcomeness using attitudinal resources:(1)The positive “security”,“capacity” and “propriety” of attitudinal resources are mainly used to build mutual support and trust between China and Africa and China’s active assistance to Africa;(2)The positive “value”of appreciation resources are mainly used to praise the practical value brought by the Human Community with a Shared Future;(3)The positive “capacity” of judgment resources are mainly used to praise China’s exemplary role in poverty alleviation and epidemic fighting.Though occupying a relatively small part,two negative discourses convey unwelcomeness:(1)The negative “value”,“composition” and “propriety” attitudinal resources are mainly used to provoke worries about unbalanced Sino-SA relations;(2)The negative “security” affect resources are mainly used to show doubts about China’s investment in Africa.The significance of the present study lies in the following two aspects: Practically,the Human Community with Shared Future has been studied in the fields of politics,journalism,and foreign affairs.It supplements the research on the African media’s stance towards the discourse from a linguistic perspective,which enriches the research in this field by providing linguistic evidence.Methodologically,it is novel in adopting corpus-based CDA by combing a large body of a dataset with qualitative discourse analysis to display the utilization of evaluative resources in constructing a stance.