Perspectivize Meaning Construction And Construal On 7/5 Events In Xinjiang

Language is not only a reflection of society, power and ideology, but a social practice and a social activity. To say something is to do something, so there is motivation beyond every sentence. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. It focuses primarily on social problems and political issues, rather than on current paradigms and fashion. More specifically, CDA focuses on the ways discourse structures enact, confirm, legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of power and dominance in society (van Dijk, 2001: 352). Political news is a typical one. The news agency is the spokesman of the powerful group, so the manipulative feature of political news is salient. Since manipulation is a mental activity, the cognition is an important member of dominating public mind. The discursive production and interpretation is concerned with activating the embodied knowledge, profiling some information and mystifying some information. Therefore, meaning construction and construal is perspectivity under the work of social practice and cognitive activity. Persepctivation causes distortions in perception. There are some glaring inconsistencies in what have been reported in domestic and at abroad referencing the western reports on 7/5 trauma. By integrating cognitive linguistics and perspectivization with CDA, this thesis reveals why the same event is constructed differently, how the journalists position readers'construal and publicize their beliefs and ideology in this event. To be brief, this study tries to uncover the manipulation of language on interpretation and explanation stages in political discourse.