Critical Discourse Analysis Of The News Reports On Kunming Terrorist Ataack In New York Times

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), also termed critical linguistics, originated from 1970s. It advocates critical analysis of the public discourse and studies the relationships among discourse, power and ideology by analyzing the text. CDA aims to improve readers’ language awareness as well as their ability of using and criticizing language so that they could realize the subtle relationship between language and language user as well as the complicated link between language use and unequal social relations.From the perspective of critical analysis, this thesis makes a deep study of the five news reports on Kunming terrorist attack in New York Times so as to reveal the attitude that the American mainstream media holds towards the Chinese government and Xinjiang clique as well as the power relations among the three sides, thus exposing the ideology hidden in the news reports and the special political purposes.This thesis mainly employs Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Model to carry out analysis which includes the stage of description, interpretation and explanation. At the stage of description, the author adopts Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as analytical tool, and the linguistic features of the five news reports in terms of classification, transitivity and modality are analyzed in detail. At the stage of interpretation, the author interprets the processes of production, distribution and consumption of discourse from news sources and reporting modes. At the last stage, from the perspective of social practice, the author intends to uncover the hidden ideology embedded in news reports by using related social and historical context.A huge number of negative words are used by New York Times to describe the attitude of the Chinese government and the measures taken by it when reporting Kunming terrorist attack, but it shows great sympathy and forgiveness to the criminals who break the laws and kill so many people. The news reporter wants to show his supportive attitude towards the Xinjiang clique and embodies the intense ideology tendency behind the reports in order to manipulate readers’ thought. Based on that, the author attempts to make a critical analysis of the news discourse for the purpose of unveiling the hidden ideology behind it and explaining how ideology affects language use and how language is used by the power class to spread its ideology. Therefore, the author hopes that this thesis would help the readers understand the unequal power relation in news discourse and improve their ability of critical reading.