A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Climate Change From Chinese And The US Media

This research represents a critical discourse analysis of news reports on climate change from China and US media by adopting Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as the basic theoretical framework.Two corpora were constructed by extracting news reports related to“climate change” from China Daily and The New York Times.Using corpus linguistics methods,the construction of the discourse,intertextuality,and social analysis is conducted from the three levels of description,interpretation,and interpretation.The description stage reveals the similarities and differences between the two media’s concerns and initially explores the attitudes of the two media on some specific issues of climate change.It is found that the two media have similarities in the construction of the discourse,that is,both sides are concerned about the impact of climate change on the world and the actions and decisions of the two countries on climate change.However,regarding bilateral cooperation on climate change,Chinese media diverges from the US media in terms of focus and inclination.China Daily pays more attention to Sino-US cooperation in addressing climate issues and has a positive attitude.On the contrary,The New York Times tends to complain and accuse China of not cooperating on the issue of Sino-US cooperation.In addition,there are also big differences in the factors that affect climate change and the focus of the two media under the Covid-19 epidemic.China Daily focuses on those energy sources that can improve environmental degradation and the positive effects of climate change under the epidemic,while The New York Times is more concerned about the pollution factors that will lead to environmental deterioration and expressed concern about the economic depression under the epidemic.In the interpretation stage,through the intertextuality analysis of the news source and reporting modes in the reported speech,it is found that,in terms of news sources,both media used numerous specific sources in their news reports,indicating the authenticity and reliability of the news.Whereas a certain proportion of semi-specific sources is also employed in both media,which weakened the authority of news discourse to a certain extent.In addition,journalists of both media used many indirect speeches and preset direct speeches.The use of these two types of reporting modes has a certain impact on news reports.This part of the research proves that the application of the above two types of reporting modes and semispecific sources have ideological connotations.In the explanation stage,this study intended to make explanations of the significant findings from the above description stage and interpretation stage.It is found that differences in beliefs,cultures,and economic systems between China and the United States caused differences in discourse construction and interpretation of news reports between the two countries.This study conducts corpus-based critical discourse analysis on the topic of climate change,which enriches the research scope of critical discourse analysis,and reveals the importance of objective and dialectical reading of news reports to a certain extent.