| Mass media has grown rapidly in recent times. Discourse influences both societal development and human behavior. As one of the most important ways of information transmission, news has been the major concern of more and more people in modern times. News reporting also plays a more and more important role in modern society. On the one hand, news promotes information exchange and resources sharing, which enhances cultural fusion and communication. On the other hand, the news media, as a tool of social control, has effects on the developments of politics, economy, and culture of a society. Serving for the special class, news reports show the tendency or attitude of individuals or groups toward the events by the language that it uses. Although news reporting always lays emphasis on its objectivity and accuracy, a news reporter transfers his own views in an almost imperceptible way to influence readers.Most scholars and researchers prefer to use critical discourse analysis to analyze news discourse. As a branch of linguistics, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a method for analyzing discourse that aims to explore how discourse is influenced by power and ideology and how discourse has impact on social relations and the knowledge structure of the readers. CDA is limited in that it fails to explain the cognitive mechanism underlying discourse organization. Cognitive linguistics is a new branch of linguistics employed by an increasing number of researchers in recent years to analyze discourse organization.This thesis aims at a cognitive analysis of news discourse using the principles of prominence underlying theories of profile and base, trajectory and landmark. With the rise of critical linguistics, the study of news discourse has been further developed. Compared with Halliday's functional linguistics and the notion of foregrounding in stylistics, prominence in cognitive linguistics places greater focus on cognitive mechanisms in the semantic information of discourse. This thesis focuses on cognitive mechanisms by which information prominence is realized by means of semantic information in news discourse. The author interprets prominence in the various levels of news discourse organization and explains how ideology influences the use of language in news discourse and how language serves for, transmits, and enhances ideology. Researchers and scholars pay more attention to the analysis of cognitive prominence on the sentence level and interpret prominence in discourse from the perspective of base and profile, trajectory and landmark, and figure-ground. In this thesis, the author further expands analysis of cognitive prominence on the discourse level.There are five chapters in this thesis. The first chapter briefly introduces news discourse and prominence approach in cognitive linguistics. It explains the purpose of this thesis, the reason for choosing the perspective of cognitive prominence, and the specific steps of analysis. Chapter two is literature review. To indicate the importance of cognitive prominence approach, it compares studies of news discourse analysis from both functional linguistics and cognitive linguistics. Six news reports are selected and presented for news discourse analysis. They are divided into pairs, each part of which reports the same event and are compared to the other. As the core part of this thesis, chapter three defines "news" and "news report", and then analyzes the "headline," the "lead," and the "body" of these news reports from the point of view of verbal structure and syntax. By analyzing the six news discourses, chapter four argues that readers can be influenced by different news reports that are about the same event but by different journalists. They are shown to have different ideology about the same event. With prominence theory, it is argued that readers can better understand the hidden information and realize how the ideology is communicated by journalists. Comparing news reports of the same event aims to help people get a better understanding of news reporting itself and others'cognitive operation. Accordingly, readers can discover the ideology behind the news and read objectively for themselves. The last chapter summarizes findings of the thesis and points out the limitations, leaving room for further study. |
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