| Critical Discourse Analysis aims at exploring the dialectical relations between language, power and ideology to reveal the hidden ideology and power in the discourse. Critical discourse analysts stress that there exists a dialectical relation between discourse and the social context: social context will influence and determine the producing of discourse and discourse will in turn influence the formation of social status, relations and value system. In modern society, news is the primary way of obtaining information, and news also exerts an influence on people's mode of thinking and value system. As the process of globalization speeds up, communication and connection between different countries becomes closer and closer, and news paper has become an important channel for people to know other countries. It is well known that comprehensive strength of a country will determine its speaking right in international affairs. As a superpower, news papers of America enjoy a dominant position in the world. Reports of American news papers on other countries will greatly affect their international image. As China's international status rises, domestic researchers begin to pay more attention to reports concerning China on American newspapers, and it has become a hot spot in academic research.This paper selects twelve news samples on China's military affairs from The New York Times and The Washington Post, two American newspapers with great world influence. Its analytical framework is Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and three-dimensional model of Fairclough, and samples will be analyzed at three levels: at textual level, lexical choice and process types will be employed as the analytical tools to examine the linguistic features; at discursive level, modes of representation and news source will be examined to reconstruct the process of producing the discourse; at social practice level, military communications between China and U.S. and future development of China's military affairs in the context of globalization will be analyzed to reveal the underlying ideology in military news.The research found that reports concerning China's military affairs on American newspapers do not represent the reality objectively and neutrally. On the contrary, they exaggerate military power of China, or even distort the facts. Specific national interests, ideologies and value system of America will influence and determine the language choice of news on China's military. On the one hand, ideologies and social-cultural context will influence the discourse construction; while on the other hand, news discourses also spread, maintain and reproduce American ideologies among readers. This thesis makes a tentative analysis of military news, a genre which is rarely researched in the field of critical discourse analysis, and its contributions lie in analyzing the linguistic strategies frequently employed in military news, helping the readers to have a better understanding of the hidden ideologies in the news and improving the readers'critical reading ability. Besides, it is also helpful for Chinese military officials to enhance external publicity of China's image, improve western readers'understanding of China's military development, and reduce readers'misunderstand, so that Sino-U.S. military relations can develop healthily. |
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