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Article In: Pragmatics and Society: Online-First Articles

Emotions in Western coverage of China during the COVID-19 pandemic

Accountability over healing

ORCiD logo with link | National Cheng Kung University
ORCiD logo with link | National Cheng Kung University
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Abstract
This study adopts the Appraisal Theory (Martin, James R., and Peter R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) to explore how emotions are discursively constructed in Western coverage of China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Patterns of emotion, emoter (experiencer of emotion), and trigger (causer of emotion) are identified by annotating news article data from four mainstream Western newswires: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, and Deutsche Welle. The annotation reveals a consistent dominance of citizen emoters attributed to the demand for accountability. While the European media frequently construct emotions elicited by the pandemic, the antagonistic perception of China in the American socio-cultural context leads to the preference for emotions triggered by the Chinese authorities. Emotions attributed to unspecified emoters play a reinforcing role. The recognition of China as “Other” shapes how these media represent China, leading to minimized positive and authorial emotions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methods
    • 2.1Corpus construction
    • 2.2Corpus annotation
  • 3.Representations of affects
    • 3.1Patterns of negative affect
    • 3.2Patterns of positive affect
    • 3.3affects from unspecified and authorial emoters
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (61)
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