Linguistic Realization Of Ideologies In English Reports On Shanghai Expo By Chinese And American Medias

The relationship between language and ideology has been a central topic in the study of news discourse for the past three decades. Critical discourse analysis is mainly to identify and analyze the ideological assumptions hidden in the text that have largely been taken for granted. This thesis serves as an attempt to investigate the relationship between language and ideologies embedded in American and Chinese media reports of 2010 Shanghai Expo by adopting tools from corpus linguistic analysis.Reports on 2010 Shanghai Expo in the recent two years are collected from the major America media. And the corpus American Reports on Shanghai Expo (ARS) based on these reports is built. Correspondingly, another corpus Chinese Reports on Shanghai Expo (CRS) is built with related reports from China Daily. Then with the help of statistical methods, the two news corpora are compared in four aspects: lexical classification, modal operators, reporting verbs and personal pronouns. In this study, a combined method is adopted. The qualitative method will be used in interpreting and explaining concrete examples, while quantitative method using Antconc and Wordsmith will be used for statistical analysis in the research.This thesis suggests that when approaching the same topic—2010 World Expo, the reporters from the two countries have their particular associations and focus. The American media emphasizes criticizing the large spending of Chinese government, while China media stresses the efforts the organizer has made and gives rise to a positive impression of Expo's operation. The differences mentioned above point to the fact that China and U. S. have different ideologies, and they are produced from their different political background, history and culture.The present study has its significance in helping understand the ideology embedded in news reports, hence raising the readers'critical language awareness. It may also shed light on China's English‐language media in terms of giving response to the problems concerned by the foreign media while reporting domestic events so as to promote communication and improve China's image in the world.