COVID-19 Lexicon in English News Reports Based on the Theory of Semantic Field

Coronavirus disease, or simply COVID-19, has affected many regions worldwide. The pandemic has caused great losses from all walks of life. Millions of people have died from the virus. In order to facilitate people’s understanding of COVID-19, the present study adopts the theory of semantic field to analyze the COVID-19 lexicon that appeared in China Daily, an authoritative international daily newspaper issued by China. A total of 100 pieces of English news issued by China Daily have been randomly selected for this research. According to the theory of semantic field in structural linguistics, the meaning of a word cannot stand alone, but come into being with the meanings of its related words. Therefore, it is reasonable to try to understand COVID-19 as thoroughly as possible with relevant words, which form its semantic field.

How ‘public’ is communicated in China’s public diplomacy: communicating environmental justice in the case of air pollution in China

This study re-evaluates the media communications of the domestic public’s interests related to environmental justice in the case of China’s air pollution in China’s public diplomacy initiatives. It examines media representations of environmental justice by China’s state-sponsored China Daily, and compares them with the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, and British and American mainstream newspapers. The examination starts from 2015, when Beijing issued the first ever red alert for air pollution, to 2018, when air pollution still haunted the country. This study finds that, besides the general policy schemes of smog mitigation, China Daily extended coverage to the general causes of smog and the domestic public’s detailed demands for smog mitigation. It mainly adopted a neutral tone in covering environmental justice. The obvious discrepancy in coverage patterns between China Daily and other news media appears in the tone of covering ‘adequacy’ in environmental justice, with the former being neutral and the latter adopting more critical voices. This study offers a better understanding of China’s evolving governmental stances in dealing with environmental justice issues in the case of air pollution.

Alignment, persuasiveness and the putative reader in opinion writing

This paper explores a new line of analysis for comparing opinion writing by reference to differences in the relationships being indicated between author and addressee. It draws on recent work within the appraisal framework literature to offer proposals for linguistics-based analyses of what has variously been termed the ‘intended’, ‘imagined’, ‘ideal’, ‘virtual’, ‘model’, ‘implied’ and ‘putative’ reader (the ‘reader written into the text’). A discussion is provided of those means by which beliefs, attitudes and expectations are projected onto this ‘reader in the text’, formulations which signal anticipations that the reader either shares the attitude or belief currently being advanced by the author, potentially finds it novel or otherwise problematic, or may reject it outright. The discussion is conducted with respect to written, persuasive texts, and specifically with respect to news journalism’s commentary pieces. It is proposed that such texts can usefully be characterised and compared by reference to tendencies in such ‘construals’ or ‘positionings’ of the putative reader – tendencies in terms of whether the signalled anticipation is of the reader being aligned or, conversely, potentially unaligned or dis-aligned with the author. The terms ‘flag waving’ and ‘advocacy’ are proposed as characterisations which can be applied to texts, with ‘flag waving’ applicable to texts which construe the reader as largely sharing the author’s beliefs and attitudes, while ‘advocacy’ is applicable to texts where the reader is construed as actually or potentially not sharing the author’s beliefs and attitudes and thereby needing to be won over. This line of analysis is demonstrated through a comparison of two journalistic opinion pieces written in response to visits by Japanese politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, one published in the English-language version of the mainland China newspaper, China Daily and one in the English-language version of the Japanese Asahi Shimbun. It is shown that one piece can usefully be characterised as oriented towards ‘flag waving’ and the other towards ‘advocacy’.

Attitudinal stance towards the anti-extradition bill movement in China Daily and South China Morning Post

Based on Appraisal Theory and critical discourse analysis, this corpus-assisted study examines how China Daily (CD) and South China Morning Post (SCMP) used appraisal resources to express their respective stances towards the anti-extradition bill movement. The results show that both newspapers employed negative resources of Judgement and the predication strategy to convey their stance, but SCMP seemed more refrained in the use of appraisal resources. CD openly stated that any illegal actions should be punished, and SCMP also criticised these actions. Besides, CD emphasized the consequences brought by violence and attributed the breakout of the protests to the opposition camp’s political intention for their own benefit, whereas SCMP highlighted Hong Kongers’ widespread opposition to the bill. These differences in language use and stance might be explained by the different press systems they respectively belong to and related to their respective historical and socio-political contexts.

Language ideologies and self-Orientalism: representing English in China Daily travelogues

While there is plenty of scholarship on the spread and study of English in China, scarce attention has been paid to representations of English in tourism discourses about China. This article aims to explore language ideologies undergirding representations of English language use in 253 travelogues from China Daily published since 2000. Findings show that most prominently in China Daily “standard” English was represented as a lingua franca for travel in China, a language of prestige, and a means of Othering. Some places are demarcated from others due to the lack of English-language services. Chinese people’s way of using English was reduced to Chinglish, a pejorative term indicating inappropriate or incorrect usage of English. Chinese use of English was thus ridiculed as an inferior Other. This critical discourse analysis of tourism discourses about China emanating from within the country demonstrates one facet of Orientalism – self-orientalism. CD’s self-orientalist strategies were embedded in oppositional East-West ideologies that set an inferior China against a superior West.

Translation Study on Terms and Sentences with Particular Chinese Features Based on a Micro-self-built Corpus

On the basis of two corpora of political and economic terms and sentences with particular Chinese features from China Daily (English version) and The New York Times, ranging from August 2019 to January 2020, a comparable analysis is made to find out the strategy of rendering those words in the news together with their lexical features. Statistics reveal an overall foreignization tendency, along with various factors imposing impacts on the process, which is examined from the perspective of both translation and linguistics.

A Comparative Analysis of War Metaphors in COVID-19 Reports in New York Times and China Daily

This paper analyzed the use of war metaphors in COVID-19 news reported by the New York Times (NYT) in comparison to the China Daily from the 1st of February 2020 to the 29th of February 2020. Based on self-selected corpus from these two newspapers, a study was conducted to compare the contrasting lexis between NYT and China Daily, as well as to analyze the reasons for their differences using the Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA). It was found that China Daily preferred using war metaphors in COVID-19 reports and war-related words such as “fight,” “combat,” and “battle.” These words appeared frequently which demonstrated that Chinese people were fighting against the pandemic. However, these words were far less used in the NYT reports compared to China Daily and the use of these words were more related to the election, trade war, etc. This reflected their focus which was more on the impact of COVID-19 on politics and the economic sector.

STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH NEWS REPORT ON PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY FROM THE LEVEL OF SYNTAX

COVID-19, which has spread rapidly and enveloped most of the world from the year 2020, is a global public health crisis the likes of which we have not seen in a century. Today, COVID-19 still remains to be brought under full control at the global level. Since the epidemic outbreak, various mass media report the COVID-19 timely and clearly, among which newspaper is a common and major one to report the epidemic situation. Randomly taking plenty of examples on COVID-19 from China Daily, this paper made a stylistic analysis on English news report of public health emergency from the level of syntax. Through analysing, the writer hopes that it can enlarges the research scope of news report, and deepens the people’s recognition on English news report of public health emergency.