Abstract
This paper applies the corpus-based critical discourse analysis to an investigation into diachronic changes in African mainstream media’s perception of China’s “Belt and Road” initiative. It built a corpus of Belt-and-Road-Initiative-related reports in African mainstream media AllAfrica from September 2013 to December 2020, and divided the corpus into three sub-corpora. Then, it made a critical analysis of the media discourses from the perspectives of key words, collocation and concordance lines. The analysis reveals that a bulk of explicit positive discourses indicating appreciation, recognition and active participation have been constructed in the reports of three stages, presenting that “Belt and Road” initiative promotes China-Africa and global economic development, but it also suggests a change of stance from full approval to implicit query and explicit criticism. Through the analysis from discursive and social practice, it is found that the reasons for the overall perception and diachronic changes are the long history and challenges of China-Africa cooperation as well as the influence of western media.
Highlights
The analysis reveals that a bulk of explicit positive discourses indicating appreciation, recognition and active participation have been constructed in the reports of three stages, presenting that “Belt and Road” initiative promotes China-Africa and global economic development, but it suggests a change of stance from full approval to implicit query and explicit criticism
This study uses critical discourse analysis as the research paradigm combined with corpus linguistics to analyze the keywords, collocations and concordance lines of reports on “Belt and Road” initiative in mainstream African media with Antconc 4.0, and discusses the diachronic changes in African mainstream media’s perception of China’s “Belt and Road” initiative and its social factors by using Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework
Through the analysis of keywords, collocation, and concordance lines, it can be found that the African mainstream media has generally maintained high recognition and strong support for “Belt and Road” Initiative, but there is a change from complete recognition to implicit questioning and to explicit criticism in some newspapers
Summary
This research uses corpus-based critical discourse analysis as the research method to explore the cognitive characteristics and diachronic changes of African media reports on “Belt and Road” Initiative, and analyze the social factors. Muhammad et al (2019) investigated the ideological construction of image of “Belt and Road” Initiative in Pakistani news media discourses through corpus-based critical discourse analysis. Kuteleva & Vasiliev (2020) explores Russia’s perception of “Belt and Road” Initiative by examining the reports of the “Belt and Road” Initiative in Russia’s major newspapers between 2013 and 2019 and traces the visibility of different topics and maps the shifts in its focus over these years From those previous studies, we can find that studies on media’s perception of “Belt and Road” Initiative is still a new research topic and most of them focus on the Asian and western media, and few studies have been done on African media. In terms of research methodology, most researches employ content analysis, discourse analysis or text analysis; only a few combined the corpus linguistics with discourse analysis, but none of them studies the diachronic changes of media’s perception of “Belt and Road” Initiative
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