A corpus-assisted diachronic study on the attitudes of British Broadsheet Newspapers towards Hong Kong's handover to China

This paper discusses two questions: 1) For UK broadsheet newspapers, what are the mechanisms of the attitude generation and presentation towards a political event? 2) Did their attitudes on this event change over time? This study acknowledges the widespread phenomenon of presenting bias and inclination in news reporting. There are multiple factors accounting for this: 1) journalists’ personal subjective construal towards the world; 2) the private ownership of those newspapers. The author built two corpora for extracting and analysing the patterns of language use: one contained news texts of 7 UK broadsheet newspapers from 01st January 1993 to 30th June 1997 and the other from 1st July 1997 to 28th December 2003. The news texts were extracted with the four keywords 'Hong Kong', 'China', 'handover' and 'takeover'. By looking into the concordance lines that contained them the author identified and discussed the linguistic devices and techniques that reveal the author's attitudes. The findings show that UK broadsheet newspapers use multiple forms of linguistic devices with varied strategies to present their attitudes towards a certain event. Also, their attitudes towards this event changed over time.