| Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA)is an important branch of discourse analysis,attracted more and more attention at home and abroad,and has been applied to various texts.Among the texts,news texts occupy a considerable research position.In retrospect,it is found that current research of news discourse mainly concerns the genres of politics and economics.However,such studies usually pay less attention to the genre of natural disasters.Based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG),this thesis employs Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to make a critical discourse analysis of 28 flood disaster news reports.For the research,14 texts about the Zhengzhou flood of China(hereafter referred to as“the Chinese flood”)and 14 texts about the Tennessee flood of America(hereafter referred to as “the American flood”)were selected from The New York Times(NYT)and The Cable News Network(CNN),due to the fact that,on the one hand,both floods took place in 2021 and caused considerable loss and damage to the people of the affected area,and on the other hand the texts about the two floods can be reasonably taken to reflect,to some extent,US media’s representation of natural disasters in China and the USA.In the first dimension of the three-dimensional model,namely at the text description stage,we illustrate the linguistic features of these reports with word choice and transitivity.In the second dimension,namely,at the discourse interpretation stage,news source,reporting mode,and reporting verb are discussed to demonstrate the relationship between the production of reports and discursive practice.In the third dimension,namely,at the discourse explanation stage,two aspects,including the flood disasters’ influence on China and the USA,and the institutional background of NYT and CNN,are considered to reveal the two news agencies’ ideological bias toward China as reflected in their news reports about the Chinese flood and the American flood.Our analysis shows that NYT and CNN’s reports of the Chinese flood show different representations from those of the American flood.While NYT and CNN represent the American flood just as a normal natural disaster,they represent the Chinese flood in an exaggerated way.These seemingly impartial and objective flood news reports actually imply the attitudes and ideologies of American news agencies,who embed implicit ideologies into the news discourse through various linguistic devices including word choice,transitivity,news sources,reporting modes,and reporting verbs,so as to convey their attitude and stance. |
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