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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 24, No. 0, pp.1278-1299
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2024
Received 02 Sep 2024 Revised 23 Sep 2024 Accepted 23 Nov 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.24..202411.1278

Engagement Resources in Chinese News Reports on Territorial Disputes in the South China Sea

Yingxuan Li
(1st and corresponding author) Ph. D Candidate, Department of English Language and Literature Yonsei University liyingxuan910@163.com


© 2024 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Territorial disputes in the South China Sea have escalated geopolitical tensions due to the region’s crucial shipping routes. Numerous incidents in this area have garnered international media attention, with various media outlets adopting different stances through their use of language. Thus, this study examines the ideological stance of Chinese news media on the South China Sea issue using appraisal theory, specifically focusing on the engagement subsystem. Using a corpus tool to analyze 20 news reports from China Daily published in March 2024, this study reveals that dialogic contraction is used more frequently than dialogic expansion. Additionally, the categories and subcategories of the engagement resource are distributed unevenly. These distribution patterns reveal how Chinese media employ rhetorical strategies to implicitly convey ideological stances, reflecting the dialogical nature of news discourse as described by Bakhtin (1981). The findings enhance our understanding of the media’s role in shaping ideological narratives. By highlighting the interplay between language, power, and ideology, it helps readers critically assess the implicit messages in Chinese news reports.

Keywords:

engagement resources, Appraisal Theory, political news reports, critical discourse analysis, territorial disputes in the South China Sea

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