Comparison of Chinese and Western News from the Attitude Perspective of Appraisal Theory: A Case Study of Nuclear-Contaminated Discharging Water

Abstract

With the process of globalization, news reporting has become an important way for people to learn about the world. News language, as the main carrier of disseminating information, has a distinct social and cultural nature. Since the period of the nuclear-contaminated water discharge, all kinds of news have emerged, which has research value. At present, the research on "nuclear-contaminated water discharge" is in the initial stage, and the research combined with linguistics is rare. In this paper, we take the attitude perspective of the appraisal theory as the theoretical analysis framework, select the related reports of China Daily and BBC as the research corpus, and use the qualitative methods to conduct a comparative analysis to explore the differences in the attitudes and views of the two. The study found that, firstly, there are very rich attitude resources in both news reports, among which appreciation resources are used the most. Second, the use of attitudinal resources in both news reports reflects that different media's evaluations and attitudes toward the same event are influenced by their positions and interests.