An Analysis of Attitude Resources on Coverage concerning COVID-19 in New York Times

Abstract

This paper adopts the attitudinal subsystem of appraisal theory to conduct a discourse analysis on news reports in the New York Times concerning COVID-19 in the initial stage. The result reveals that Appreciation resources account for the highest proportion in related coverage, while Affect and Judgement come in second and third place, respectively, with similar percentages. With regard to Affect, New York Times tends to use In/security and Dis/inclination; Judgement, capacity and Appreciation, Composition. From the perspective of the polarity of attitude, it can be seen that writers in the New York Times use both explicit and implicit attitude resources to express negative feelings toward the Chinese government’s response to this pandemic.