本文基于态度系统对突发公共卫生事件新闻报道的积极话语分析，揭示了中国政府应对突发公共卫生事件措施的有效性，为世界各国应对重大突发公共卫生事件提供了一个范例。中国一直积极参与卫生领域的国际合作，践行人类共同未来的社区理念。
Chapter I Introduction
1.1 Research Background
As is related to the health of the majority of people, the occurrence of public healthemergency always stirs up feelings of public and triggers the competing reports with newsmedia as well as discussing intensely among people. Since the outbreak of COVID-19epidemic, people around the world are facing the severe challenge of it that greatlythreatens the life and health safety of citizens, and China has taken various measures toprevent the spread of the virus.
In response to major public health emergencies, the attitude of the news mediareflected can influence public’s thoughts and speech directly. Therefore, positive attituderevealed in public health emergency news reports can lead ordinary people to have positivefeelings towards the COVID-19 epidemic at the critical moment. That is to say, it isconducive to gathering strength and inspiring people, guiding the public to treat andanalyze the epidemic rationally and correctly, taking scientific preventive measures, andactively coping with the possible impact of the epidemic (Gao & Cai, 2020). In addition,news communication is one of the main ways affecting the national image. It can timelyreport the emergency strategies of Chinese government and the active participation ofordinary Chinese people, as well as China’s effective prevention and control measures ofthe COVID-19 epidemic are being presented to the international community. Hence thenews reports and news publicity of public health emergency about COVID-19 is aconsiderable way to build China’s national image and promote its influence around theworld. Moreover, it breaks the prejudice of western countries against China and effectivelyshapes China’s national image in the external communication (Li, 2020).
Figure 3-1. The framework of the appraisal system (Martin & White, 2005, p. 38).
............................
1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Research
It is worth mentioning that, as a new perspective of discourse research, thedevelopment of PDA is still in its infancy. Based on attitude system, this thesis makes apositive discourse analysis of public health emergency news reports taking COVID-19news reports as an example from China Daily. In this study, it can explore the constructionof the positive discourse meaning in the process of text analysis and the positive effects ofattitude system in the public health emergency news reports, which in order to let the worldview China’s attitude and abilities to fight with the epidemic. Therefore, it has far-reachingsocial effects to stimulate positive social energy and build a harmonious society.
After the purpose of this study is introduced, this study also has prominentsignificance in theory and practice.
Theoretically speaking, there are few applied researches of PDA, and in comparison,conducting a positive discourse analysis based on the attitude system is a new researchperspective to explore public health emergency news reports. Hence, this study can enrichthe research field and contribute to the development of PDA. In addition, this thesis candemonstrate the feasibility of the application of attitude system to analysis public healthemergency news reports from the perspective of PDA.
Some practical significance is mentioned from the practical point of view. First,through the positive discourse analysis of news discourse, it can be better understood howattitudinal resources used in public health emergency news reports influence and changereader’s attitudes implicitly or explicitly, so that foreign readers can receive informationthat is more accurate because the corpus of this study is from the English version of ChinaDaily. Second, by analyzing the positive discourse effects of attitude system in the publichealth emergency news reports, this study attempts to show that China has undertaken theresponsibility of curbing the epidemic with unprecedented speed and efficiency, provokedChina’s responsibility expected by the international community, and built a reliablenational image. Meanwhile, it is of far-reaching social significance for building a positiveand harmonious society and China’s active practice of the concept of a community ofshared future for humankind will be reflected.
...............................
Chapter II Literature Review
2.1 An Introduction to Discourse Analysis
Discourse analysis was first put forward by American structuralist linguist Z. Harris inhis paper entitled Discourse Analysis in the 28th volume of the American magazinelanguage. Harris. Z. Harris (1952) tried to propose a method to analyze the coherentspoken language by pointing out clearly: “language is not a scattered word or occurs in asentence, but in a coherent discourse” (p. 381). However, there are some problems worthnoting that he not only ignored the meaning and content of discourse, but also ignored thehierarchical relationship between sentences in the process of analyzing discourse.
Up to 1969, discourse analysis has been further developed. According to Labov(1969), discourse analysis is to make rules, which emphasizes the connection betweenwhat is said and what is done, as well as the prerequisite of discourse rules. He furtherexplained, “Discourse analysis must satisfy certain conditions before it can be regarded asa specific communicative act” (p. 54). Widdowson (1979) proposes from the perspective ofdiscourse function that discourse analysis is the study of “sentences used forcommunication to complete social behavior” (p. 52), emphasizing its communicativefunction.
In the 1980s, discourse analysis entered its heyday, along with the emergence ofmonographs and papers related to discourse analysis. In 1981, an academic journal TEXTon discourse analysis edited by van Dijk was initiated, which provided an excellentplatform for further academic exchanges. In addition, van Dijk has also edited a number oftheses on discourse analysis, which has greatly expanded the influence of discourseanalysis in the world.
..................................
2.2 An Introduction to PDA
According to Martin (2004), critical discourse analysis (CDA) is the critical analysisand exposure of the cruel “realis”, while PDA is the constant struggle for the beautiful“irealis”. In 1999, PDA was put forward in a paper entitled Positive Discourse Analysis:Solidity and Change presented at an International Seminar about Critical DiscourseAnalysis, and it was mentioned by Professor J. R. Martin from Sydney University. Atpresent, the definition of PDA has not been clearly defined. After a preliminary discussion,some linguists believed that positive discourse analysis is “developed from CDA, whichadopts a positive attitude to interpret discourse and aims to build a harmonious humansociety” (Liao, 2009).
There are main ideas of PDA summarized in the following. Martin (1999) believesthat CDA is deconstruction, but PDA is construction. In a broad sense, PDA not onlystudies the influence of power factors on discourse, but also pays more attention to theconstruction of a harmonious society through discourse analysis. It attempts to get out ofthe negative shadow of critical discourse analysis, develop from deconstructive philosophyto constructive construction, and promote the construction of a harmonious world throughdiscourse analysis activities, which is undoubtedly an important turn in discourse analysistheory and practice. (Huang, Leng, & Gu, 2007).
Moreover, Martin gave a more specific explanation of PDA in his published articles.Martin (2000) thinks that his theory tended to be “evolutionary” rather than“revolutionary” when he proposed the concept of PDA, and he hoped that this constructivetheory can make up for the negative influence of criticism on the society in the analysis ofpower, so as to realize peaceful linguistics and build a better society through discourseanalysis. What’ s more, he pointed out that PDA is applicable to diplomacy, conference,mediation, negotiation and so on, and the discourse content of “reconciliation” wasachieved through mutual “negotiation” even when there are conflicts of views and interestsbetween the two sides. The method of analyzing positive discourse maintained by Martin,including the “multi-modal” of language and non-language, the “multi-striatal” ofphonetics, semantics, vocabulary and grammar, and the “multi-functional” analysis ofHalliday’s systemic functional grammar.
.................................
Chapter III Theoretical Foundation.....................................17
3.1 An Introduction to Appraisal Theory....................................17
3.2 Attitude System of Appraisal Theory..................................... 20
Chapter IV Research Methodology.................................. 28
4.1 Research Questions.......................................... 28
4.2 Research Instrument....................................28
Chapter V Results and Discussion..................................... 35
5.1 Distribution of Attitude System in Public Health Emergency News Reports.........35
5.1.1 Distribution of Affect Resources in Public Health Emergency News Reports...............38
5.1.2 Distribution of Judgement Resources in Public Health Emergency NewsReports.............................39
Chapter V Results and Discussion
5.1 Distribution of Attitude System in Public Health EmergencyNews Reports
Attitude system consists of affect, judgement and appreciation, which associated withpeople’s emotion, including emotional reaction, judgement of human behavior andevaluation of entity (Martin & White, 2005). Therefore, attitudinal resources play animportant role in the construction of interpersonal discourse meaning in news discourseand different attitudinal resources used in news reports can better express writer’s valuesopinions and values on news events. Especially in the public health emergency newsreports, the reporters of news would apply kinds of attitudinal resources to express theirviews and influence readers.
After detailed annotation with the aid of UAM corpus tool 3.3v, the overalldistribution of three attitude sub-systems can be derived from the annotation software. Itshould be noted that the evaluation of attitude system is based on the lexical level.Therefore, the repetition times of same word in different sentences is also calculated by thenumber of times. The data results are shown in Figure 5-8.
Table 5-5The Distribution of Attitudinal Resources
............................
Chapter VI Conclusion
6.1 Major Findings of the Study
This study makes positive discourse analysis on public health emergency news reportstaking COVID-19 as an example. After the three attitude sub-systems are analyzed in detail,the positive discourse meaning constructed by them is revealed and discussed, which helpsto better understand the positive effects of attitude system in news reports. The majorfindings are as follows:
Firstly, after making the annotation of the selected corpus in UAM Corpus Tool 3.3v,the data obtained show that a variety of attitudinal resources are used in the selected corpus,and there is uneven distribution of each subsystem of attitude system. Judgement resourcestake the largest proportion, followed by appreciation resources, and finally affect resources.They account for 58.13%, 24.07% and 17.8% respectively. Moreover, the characteristics ofnews reports are authenticity, timeliness and accuracy. Therefore, judgement system ismost commonly used attitude system by journalists to convey information and expressattitude. In addition, the positive attitudinal resources far exceed the negative attitudinalresources in this study. Positive attitudinal resources helps to build up the positive nationalimages of China to fight against the epidemic conveyed by journalists in public healthemergency news reports, and these positive views and attitudes can influence the readers.
Secondly, a further analysis of the three attitude sub-systems reveals positivediscourse meaning in public health emergency news reports. In affect system, theutilization rate of inclination resources are the highest, followed by security resources andsatisfaction resources. These positive affect resources demonstrate that China hasconfidence and determination in fighting the epidemic, as well as Chinese medical workersand patients infected with COVID-19 are confident while facing the virus. At the sametime, China actively calls on countries from all over the world to work together to fight theepidemic. In judgement system, capacity resources are used most frequently of attitudinalresources accounting for 54.83% in judgement system and 31.87% in whole attitudesystem, indicating that capacity resources are the most effective attitudinal resources toconstruct positive discourse meaning. Judgement resources are employed to evaluateChina’s ability to fight the epidemic from domestic and abroad. These judgement resourcesin news reports help to reveal the contribution of people from all lifestyles in China to fightagainst the epidemic. In appreciation system, the utilization rate of valuation resources isthe highest, which mainly evaluates the action and achievements of China in the process offighting the COVID-19 epidemic. In addition, the use of appreciation resources enablespeople around the world to realize the importance of strengthening cooperation andsolidarity to curb the virus.
reference(omitted)