The discursive construction of a conflict: a case of disputed islands in the East China Sea

IF 0.8 3区文学 Q3 COMMUNICATION

Text & Talk Pub Date : 2022-04-28 DOI:10.1515/text-2020-0187

Hideo Watanabe

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract This article aims to identify how Chinese and Japanese online English-language newspaper editorials construct their arguments about a group of disputed islands – the Diaoyu Islands in Chinese, and the Senkaku Islands in Japanese – from a linguistic perspective. Newspapers in the two countries have played an important role in appealing not just to domestic readers, but also to international readers on this issue. A corpus of 50 editorials published between 2012 and 2016 was compiled from the English-medium Chinese and Japanese newspapers. The article examines evaluative language in the editorials, using an APPRAISAL framework developed within systemic functional linguistics. This project also adopts corpus techniques for selecting the samples. The findings show that the two corpora frequently used negative evaluations towards the opposite country. The two corpora, however, differed in the varieties of evaluations in the editorials. By exploring the discursive construction of the editorials in relation to contextual information, the analytical focus is on the way the discursive resources contribute to realising the ideologies behind the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands dispute. The findings contribute to our understanding of the way conflicting views can be constructed with the use of linguistic resources in the context of online English-medium news media.

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冲突的话语建构:一个东海争议岛屿的案例

在这个问题上，两国的报纸不仅在吸引国内读者，而且在吸引国际读者方面发挥了重要作用。2012年至2016年间发表的50篇社论的语料库是由英文媒体的中文和日语报纸汇编而成的。本文使用系统功能语言学中开发的评估框架来检查社论中的评价语言。本项目还采用了语料库技术来选择样本。研究结果表明，这两个语料库经常对对方国家进行负面评价。然而，这两个语料库在社论中评价的多样性上有所不同。这些发现有助于我们理解在线英语媒体新闻媒体中语言资源的使用是如何构建相互矛盾的观点的。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Text & Talk Multiple-

CiteScore

1.70

自引率

16.70%

发文量

期刊介绍： Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.