An Analysis Of Time's China-Reporting From The Perspective Of Critical Linguistics

Critical Linguistics is a newly developed branch of linguistics studies. It aims to study the relationships between language, ideology, and power. It argues that both the ideological loading of particular ways of using certain linguistic forms systematically and the relations of power which underlie them are often unclear to people. Critical Discourse Analysis, initiated by critical linguistics, offers critical readings of newspapers, political propaganda, official documents, regulations, formal genres such as the interview, and so on, to show how social groups (us vs. " them) are presented in discourse and how ideological discourse is constructed socio-politically as a means to confirm group dominance.Drawing on the theories of critical linguistics and superstructures of news, the present study analyzes the discourse characteristics of the weekly news magazine Time on its China reports, from the perspectives of its headlines, transitivity structures, and modality structures. Our investigation reveals that Time employs the strategy of self-positive representation and other-negative representation, constructing a distorted image of China. In comparison with Beijing Review, this nature is manifest.The paper falls into four parts, the first giving a general picture of critical linguistics, the second introducing its contribution to news discourse, the third elaborating the superstructures of news, and the fourth dwelling on the analysis of Time.The author points out in the conclusion that the systematic application of critical linguistics and news structure theory into specific discourse analysis is rare at home linguistic studies. The attempts made in this paper seem to be weak and insubstantial. It is urgent for us to be critical about all information around us, especially in the era of globalization.