The Study Of Cyber-bullying From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

As an online communication with malicious intentions,cyber-bullying has spread the entire cyberspace.Not only has it destroyed the normal environment of network but also it has brought negative consequences to people’s health and social harmony.Therefore,this thesis aims to study the relationship between cyber-bullying practice and social ideology from the perspective of CDA,in which the logical relevance between language with violence and social contexts can be further intensified through the reconstruction of cyber-bullying.Thereby,the shaping influence of language with violence towards cyber-bullying practice can be revealed;the constraint of social systems towards cyber-bullying can also be uncovered.According to the definition of cyber-bullying in this thesis,the author has collected 140 comments with cyber-bullying implications as analyzed data around four microblog incidents.The author employs Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as theoretical framework and adopts transitivity,modality systems of systemic-functional grammar and Antconc Tool 3.5.0 as research instruments,carrying out this research by the combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches,aiming to answer the following research questions:(1)What are the discourse characteristics of cyber-bullying based on the perspectives of ideational function and interpersonal function?(2)How do media capital groups implement cyber-bullying interactions with online participants during discursive practice?(3)What are the implicit ideologies behind cyber-bullying?The research results are as follows:(1)online aggressors use relational process most frequently in order to adopt its sub-type(attributive process)to impose negative attributes on targeted victims and adopt the other sub-type(identifying process)to manifest the identity of victim and the distorted value of aggressor.With regard to the functional role of cyber-bullying,it mainly acts as participants,and realizes the bullying function in an explicit way.Combining functional roles with different processes,relational process tends to convey the bullying implications through being as attributes in attributive processes and constituting identifiers in identifying processes respectively.Based on modality system,high value of modality is dominant in presenting cyber-bullying.Meanwhile,online aggressors are prone to combine modal auxiliaries with adjuncts to exactly express negative appraisal meaning.Besides,contradictory classification and biased tag are used to realize the modalmeaning of nouns.As a whole system,the bullying meaning realized by modal choices is closely related to the semantic value of ideational meaning in the corresponding clauses.(2)The initial order of discourse is non-parallel.Meanwhile,media capital groups can enjoy much more discourse resources(prior reporting sequence,stronger alliance and more active audience),which make media capital groups dominate discourse power during the interactions.When media capital groups adopt referential strategy,prediction strategy and irregular intertextuality to construct the voices that are beneficial to their own ideologies,the conflict focuses are prone to be dynamically changed.This situation makes online audience who have experienced emotional mobilization want to deconstruct the disparate order of discourse,while the dominant try to maintain the current situation,this process of reconstruction via violent means succeeds in evoking cyber-bullying practice in the field of cyberspace.By respectively studying the collocational strength and concordances on involved party and online audience,the author studies the semantic preference and semantic prosody of collected data to reveal how netizen groups express the attitude and peer evaluation based on incidents,further explaining the implicit ideologies behind cyber-bullying.The results indicate:(3)the infiltration of neoliberalism has affected the online communication of audience,provoking audience to blindly pursue the freedom of online expression;the imbalanced and inadequate development in the period of social transition brings about the part breakdown of social advance.In this sense,some people can not fully enjoy the dividend of social reform,gradually accumulating the negative mentality of the vulnerable.Thus,cyber-bullying has become a tool to protect their own rights and to vent dissatisfaction;surrounded by pseudo-environment,elite groups actually control discourse power of network medium,which provides much convenience for agenda setting and fragmented presentation of network platforms;being lack of media literacy,vicious group socializing among online audience accelerates a new round of cyber-bullying.