Discursive Construction of Delivery Workers in China Daily

Abstract

This article introduces a corpus-based critical discourse analysis to explore how this linguistically-oriented approach can be a helpful complement to the studies of news discourse and beyond. It demonstrates how to use this approach to examine how China Daily constructs the image of delivery workers between pre-2020 and post-2020. It is achieved by analysis of keywords and collocational network of delivery as well as some of its concordances. Findings show that the image of delivery workers in China Daily has a shift during the two periods, mainly turning the negative into the positive, which helps the public have a better understanding of this occupation and promote their social integration.