A Study Of Chinese Mainstream Media Discourse On Diaoyu Islands Issue

The dispute of Diaoyu Islands has been one of the most sensitive topics in theSino-Japanese political relations. The reports about the Diaoyu Islands issue reported by Chinesemainstream media are significant. Based on the related linguistic theories, and with the theory ofVan Dijk’s discourse analysis as a reference, this thesis analyzes news reports on the DiaoyuIslands issue that reported by the People’s Daily, People’s Daily Overseas Edition, GuangmingDaily, and Xinhua Daily Telegraph which are the representatives of Chinese mainstream media.This thesis also takes the research method which combined textual analysis, contextual analysis,investigation and statistics etc. together.Firstly, this study explores the social context and the individual context that formed in thefeatures of mainstream media discourse from the perspective of the rhetorical context, whichincludes the tripartite interaction process of the government, the media and the public in thenews reports, and the symbiotic and interdependent relationship between discourse constructorand receiver. Then, proceeded separately from the macrostructure and microstructure of themainstream media discourse, this thesis analyzes the discourse topic related to the five stages ofdevelopment of the news reports on the Diaoyu Islands issue, and the discourse features of thereport data shown in the respects of vocabulary markers, sentence categories’ selection andrhetorical devices, which are helpful for grasping their rhetorical strategies and pragmaticfunction in the discourse construction. Finally, the paper makes a summary of a series of studies,puts forward some suggestions for the problems of the news reports, and points out thelimitations and implications for the future researches as well, which has certain referencesignificance for the interdisciplinary researches that require combining multi-field theoreticalknowledge.