Discursive construction of nationalist ideologies in times of crisis: A comparative analysis of the news media in the United States and China

Using critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the tool of inquiry, this dissertation explores the discursive relationship between language use and the construction of nationalist ideologies within the news media during moments of political crises and national conflicts, with a focus on the mass daily press in the United States and China. Diverting from some approaches to news analysis whose goal is to unveil the truth about the world or the hidden ideologies disguised by the text, this project seeks instead to understand how meanings about the nation and nationalist ideologies are constructed through linguistic and rhetorical means in newspaper discourse. I suggest that we need to think of the relationship between language use and the construction of nationalist ideologies as being discursive and dynamic, embedded in real historical and sociopolitical moments.; Two national daily newspapers respectively in the United States and China are chosen for analysis in this project: The New York Times and China Daily. Specifically, the dissertation looks at the two newspapers' coverage of the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by NATO in May 1999 and the collision between a US military aircraft and a Chinese fighter jet in April 2001. Guided by John Thompson's "depth-hermeneutical" framework, the analysis of ideological constructions in this project considers not only the variations of language used by the two newspapers corresponding to particular nationalist ideologies, but also the ways in which these variations interact with the wider social contexts, (re)constructing our understanding of the two events and specific nationalist ideologies.; Chapter one provides an overview of news discourse as a site of generating nationalist ideologies and the discursive relationship between language, national newspapers and nationalism; chapter two outlines the approaches to news analysis that inform the analysis in this project and maps the multidisciplinary methodology used in this project; chapter three provides a social-historical analysis of the press system in China; chapters four and five analyze the data collected for this study, with chapter four focusing on analyzing the transitivity, thematization, and lexical cohesion of the news texts and chapter five on voices, styles, and genres.