A Comparative Analysis of Chinese and American News Discourse Based on Appraisal Theory

Abstract

This paper takes news reports about Fukushima nuclear wastewater discharge from China Daily and Washington Post as the research corpus, conducts a comparative analysis on the corpus from three subsystems of appraisal theory including attitude, engagement and graduation, then statistically analyzes the use of appraisal resources in the discourses and their distributional characteristics to explore attitudes and stances of the Chinese and American media towards Japanese wastewater nuclear discharge. The results show that the overall distribution of appraisal resources in China Daily and Washington Post is comparable and the difference in the frequency of using attitude resource is not significant, but the uses of engagement resources and graduation resources in China Daily are higher than those in Washington Post.