The International Image of the Earliest Departure Port of the Maritime Silk Road: A Corpus-driven Study of English News Reports on Guangzhou

Abstract

Deng, F.; Li, Z.; Li, Y., and Lyu, J., 2020. The international image of the earliest departure port of the Maritime Silk Road: A corpus-driven study of English news reports on Guangzhou. In: Yang, Y.; Mi, C.; Zhao, L., and Lam, S. (eds.), Global Topics and New Trends in Coastal Research: Port, Coastal and Ocean Engineering. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 103, pp. 1070–1074. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.Guangzhou, as the “earliest departure port of the Maritime Silk Road” and an international city, has attracted more and more attention at home and abroad. News is an important tool to spread information and record the social events and keywords are often taken to be markers of “aboutness” to indicate the main idea of the news reports. This paper retrieves the keywords from two self-built corpora, Corpus of Guangzhou's Local Media Reports and Corpus of China's Media Reports, which cover the news reports on Guangzhou from 2010 to 2018, and then studies the collocations and semantic prosody of the keywords. The research results show that as to the similarities, the news reports from both Guangzhou's local media and China's media are becoming internationalized recently. Furthermore, they both pay close attention to the holding of Asian Games, actions given by Guangzhou's government, the incity and international development of Guangzhou. However, the coverage of news reports by Guangzhou's local media is larger than that of news reports by China's media; Guangzhou's local media mainly targets readers within the city but China's media mainly targets readers in the whole country; Guangzhou's local media stresses the connection with surrounding cities while China's media emphasizes the connection with domestic main cities. In addition, Guangzhou's local media uses a positive tone to give news reports while China's media uses a neutral one when reporting Guangzhou.