Discursive Process And Discursive Strategies: A Case Study Of The Production Of New Health-care Reform Plan

Applying the theories and methods of critical discourse analysis, the present thesis investigates the discursive strategies and discursive process in the study of production of new Plan for China's Health-Care Reform (PCHR). Based on Fairclough's concepts of"discourse"and"genre", with Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, Van Leeuwen's genre analysis, Fairclough's genre chain and Peng Xuanwei's Chinese modality classification as the analytical tools, the study analyses both Wen Jiabao's Governmental Work Reports (excerpt) from year 2005 to 2009 and two public's suggestions collected on the official website of the National Development and Reform Commission. Through systematic analysis, it is found that: 1) the Governmental Work Report (2009) concerning health-care reform belongs to the genre of governance, which makes use of various discursive strategies, such as obligatory command, to help the production of new PCHR. Besides, by comparative study of report from year 2005 to 2009, it is seen that the consequent usage of such discursive strategies rises steadily. 2) The public's suggestions are marked with high degree of modality and legitimation command. 3) In comparison between governmental report and the public's suggestions, it was found that those two different voices do not carry equal weight in the production of PCHR: the relationship between Chinese government and the public are structured, with the former being decisive in effect, and the later alternative impact. 4) The production of PCHR is a discursive process, which involves a series of draft and suggestions. All theses different kinds of genres form a genre chain. And such genre chain is characterized by entextualizing topics, in which process a topic is decontextualized from one genre and recontextualized into another.The contribution of this research can be outlined in two perspectives: 1) This study makes an attempt to investigates the production of PCHR (2009) from perspective of discursive strategies and discursive process. The aim is to provide discursive evidence of the production of such new Plan. 2) As a part of China's Health-Care Reform, the production of PCHR (2009) pushes the new reform ahead. The present research is helpful for CDA learners'better understanding of the dialectical relationship between"discourse"and"social practice".