Critical Discourse Analysis Of U. S. And China Mainstream Media News Reports On Floods

Critical discourse analysis, developed by English linguists Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress etc. in the late 1970s, is on the basis of M.A.K. Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics. It seeks to uncover the relationship between ideology and power which are hidden in public discourses and the counteraction of public discourses'controlling and formation of people's ideology. It is supposed that news reports are confined to a certain limit by news administrative authority. Therefore, they are inevitably influenced by dominant elites'ideologies. At the same time, news reports can have a direct or indirect effect on the formation of people's ideologies and attitudes. That is why news report is not a natural phenomenon coming straight from the reality any more, but essentially a social practice stained with mainstream ideology of the society.Starting with the introduction of the definition of critical discourse analysis, the thesis presents a review of the theoretical approaches adopted by the linguists in the field of CDA. The following part is intended to make a theoretical account of some traditional analytic tools. Last, from the perspective of the critical linguistics, the author analyzes the news reports on flood disasters chosen from China Daily and the New York Times, using the three analytic tools such as lexical choice, transitivity and speech presentation.Of the corpus,three pieces of news reports are chosen from China Daily while one from the New York Times. They are all involved in the Katrina Hurricane at the four anniversary of September 11 Attacks. In contrast with the former disaster, four pieces of news reports, which are chosen respectively from China Daily and the New York Times, are about Zhouqu landslide in Gansu caused by torrential rains. The results of data analysis show that because of different ideologies the two media-China Daily and the New York Times differ in their lexical choices, which can be embodied in the perspective of the naming of the event; the two sides differ in their choices of process types of transitivity; the examination of speech presentation from the perspective of news sources and speech reporting modes shows that guided by different ideologies, the reporters intentionally make choice in speech presentation;Based on the above study, the author's analysis tests the theory of critical discourse analysis. On the one hand, namely, news discourse is not neutral media but a social practice and embodiment of ideology. On the other hand, the thesis reveals that the relationship between ideology and power is not only hidden in the political and economic news reports but also in the flood disaster news reports.