A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis Of American Gun Violence Issue Reports In China Daily And The Washington Post

Gun violence is one of the major public issues in American society.In 2018,it was the most serious year of gun violence in the United States.After that,various policies and news about gun violence have emerged,which has aroused widespread concern in the domestic and foreign media.The diverse reports reflect the different views and attitudes of the various countries behind the gun violence.Critical discourse analysis,an effective way to analyze news texts,is intended to reveal the influence of hidden ideology on the discourse and the reaction of discourse to the ideology,and how these two aspects derive from the social structure and power relations,then serve them.At present in China,there have been quite a few linguistic studies on American gun violence previously.Besides,in the study of previous scholars,critical discourse analysis is mainly carried out by qualitative research,which makes the validity of the conclusion questionable.Thus,a contrastive analysis of corpus-based critical discourse has its research value for gun violence issues.This research adopts Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Discourse Framework and a combination of qualitative and quantitative research approaches,aiming to conduct the contrastive analysis of critical discourse about American gun violence issues from the micro to macro level.The author collected relevant reports of American gun violence issues from the official websites of China Daily and The Washington Post,and built two small corpora,whose tokens are 24136 and 24344 respectively.At the micro level,mainly from the corpus tool Ant Conc 3.4.3,the “high frequency words”,“concordance lines”,and“collocates” are used to carry out the contrastive analysis about the reports on Americangun violence issues between China Daily and The Washington Post.At the macro level,this research is on the basis of two aspects which are called discursive practice and social practice.In terms of discursive practice,it combines the language characteristics of two newspapers to interpret,then further discovers the hidden views and attitudes.As for the level of social practice,social orientation and explanation of the positional tendencies and ideologies generated by Sino-US news reports in the institutional,situational,and social-cultural contexts are carried out.The research findings are mainly summarized as follows:(1)Research findings of text analysis are shown as follows: China Daily focuses on the human rights of American citizen,the situation of casualties and victims,and the measures taken by American government as well,while The Washington Post focuses on the cause of gun violence issues,and attempts to report less in the theme of gun violence issues,so as to weaken the negative stimulus to American citizens.And in China Daily,the collocates of word “gun” are firm and positive.While in The Washington Post,many rare collocates related to politics and relatively negative adjectives can be found,and the verbs collocated with the word “gun” convey a weaker tone than those in China Daily.(2)Research findings of discursive practice analysis are demonstrated as follows: The Washington Post attempts to use semi-specific and unspecific information channels to reduce the negative stimulus to citizens,and American government prefers to be obscure to the serious fact,so as to achieve the political interests.While,China Daily tends to utilize unspecific information channel to report the situation of gun shots and death toll,which directly reveals China cares for the suffering of people,wishes the vision of peace,and opposes all forms of gun violence.Then,the use of direct speech in China Daily even has a large percentage,which reflects that China Daily puts more emphases on the authenticity and authority.And The Washington Post uses excessive indirect speeches,which weakens the authenticity of the report and intentionally has dissembled some contents presenting the views and attitudes to serve the American government.(3)Research findings of social practice analysis are concluded as follows: Behind the disputes between the Democratic and Republican parties in the US Congress on gun control,there are many factors of institutional,situational,and social-cultural contexts.Even if serious gun violence issues occur every year,the US government finally findssome temporary reasons for obscuring the larger point,and uses some moderate responses to make the problem unsolved.However,China has strict control over guns in terms of institutional,situational,and social-cultural contexts,and these three aspects all have a legal or draft law on gun violence.Equally important,China has always advocated peaceful environment,and peace is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.The research significance is as follows:(1)The combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistic is conducive to better providing reference and reflection for critical discourse research.(2)This research is helpful to understand the two newspapers’ different language strategies of the same themes,then realizes the interpretation and explanation of the other cultures,thus promoting cross-cultural communication.(3)This research will have a certain significance for people to carry out relevant external publicity related to American gun violence in a targeted manner.