The Language of Evaluation in the Age’s News on Huawei 5G Technology

Abstract

As China accelerates the pace of technology development, the “China Tech Threat” pervades the Western media. The representative Chinese tech enterprise Huawei suffers questioning on its international strategy. Based on Martin’s ATTITUDE system in his appraisal framework, the paper explores attitudinal resources in the Age’s news discourses on Huawei 5G technology with UAM Corpus Tool. The research analyses the attitudinal resources with statistics and figures out Huawei’s technological image established in these discourses. Among these resources, negative judgment resources are of the highest frequency, followed by appreciation resources and at last by affect resources, implying that the texts make a negative evaluation of Huawei’s capacity, propriety, and social value. The present study illustrates how attitudinal resources play an important role in constructing Huawei’s technological image and enriches the current reservoir that stores relatively insufficient case analyses of news discourses about technology.