A Corpus-based Analysis Of Stance Markers In English News Discourse

Stance markers are the lexico-grammatical features which indicate the personal stance of the speaker or writer’s personal feelings, attitudes, value judgments, or assessments in a proposition. The present study selects four major events happened in China in the first half year of 2014 including Hong Kong “Occupy Central” march, the disputes about the South China Sea, the Kunming attack, and the Shanghai Husi food scandal. We search the relative news reports in four media agencies respectively from America and China: CNN, the New York Times, the CCTV-News and China Daily, and collect these reports as data to establish two corpora for further study.Based on the self-built corpus, the study examines the usage of stance markers in English news discourse under Fairclough’s three dimensional model of CDA. The concrete analytical steps are as follows. The first step is text practice in which we make detailed description and analysis of the similarities and differences of stance markers between Chinese and American English news discourse. It shows that the two countries’ media are all use less style stance markers in their news discourse, and Chinese media prefer epistemic stance markers while American media tend to use more attitude stance markers in their reports on Chinese news. The second step is discursive practice in which we make careful comparison and analysis to the sources and modes of discourse representation of the collected data. The result indicates that for the same event, Chinese media always choose to report the official authority speeches and to report them directly; while the American media show a rather different tendency----they prefer to report the unnamed people’s speeches, and use indirect or free indirect expressing way to represent the news. The third step is socio practice at which level the study attends to reveal the hidden reasons behind these textual and discursive differences between American and Chinese English news discourse. Four possible reasons may account for the differences above including the mass media features, cultural backgrounds, political ideologies and historical Sino-US relations.The study constructs a small-scaled corpus, conducts the corpus-driven research method, and makes detailed comparison and analysis of stance markers between Chinese and American English news discourses. It also enlarges the scope of critical discourse analysis by analyzing stance markers. In the end, the findings of the study give the readers some implications for critical awareness when reading news discourses.