Media Representation of China’s Policy in US Media Coverage of South China Sea Dispute: A Semantic Prosody Analysis

This study examines the representation of China's policy in the media reporting of the South China Sea dispute in The New York Times and The Washington Post by investigating the semantic prosody of the term "China" with a corpus-based approach.The analysis of collocates of China, namely "claim, action, disputes" in the co-text of concordances indicates that media representation of China in US news coverage is associated with negative semantic prosodies that revolve around China's territorial claims, island construction, and resolution of the dispute.This reveals that the stance of news report is influenced by its social, cultural, and political context.