An Attitudinal Analysis of NPR’s Carbon-reduction Reports

Abstract

Under the framework of the Appraisal System, this paper conducts a discourse analysis on NPR’s carbon-reduction reports to investigate the distributional features of attitudinal resources and how the resources are adopted to convey ecological values and stances in the reports. Attitudinal resources are manually annotated on UAM Corpus Tool 6, the distributional features of which will be analyzed and combined with the statistical results. The findings demonstrate that in the reports, sub-types of resources are adopted for different purposes. Affect resources are mainly used to show the intensity of a country’s resolution to tackle climate-change issues, while judgement resources are mostly directed towards a country’s ability and commitment to deal with climate change, and appreciation resources are adopted to give twofold responses about the feasibility and reliability of specific climate change plan. By conducting an attitudinal analysis of NPR’s carbon-reduction reports, the study reveals the ecological stance and value of NPR on carbon-reduction. Combining the theoretical framework of the Appraisal System, this paper also provides a new perspective for discourse analysis on environmental reports.