Critical Discourse Analysis Of English Science News

This thesis is about the analysis of English science news discourse from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CD A).The first part is contributed to a general introduction and a literature review of CDA. CDA refers to the use of an ensemble of techniques for the study of discourse and language use as social and cultural practices. It focuses on issues of ideology, and the discursive processes of its enactment, concealment and reproduction by texts.Distinguished from other CDA theories derived from functional tradition, the theory proposed in this paper speaks of ideology in a combined sense of being at the same time cognitive and social. Following the reasoning of Teun van Dijk, the second part starts with a multidisciplinary definition of ideology, according to which ideologies are the basic beliefs that form the basis of the social representations of a group. The fundamental propositions of ideologies monitor the acquisition of group knowledge and attitudes, and hence indirectly monitor the mental models that group members form about social events. These models are the representations that control social practices, including the production and comprehension of discourse.The thesis then examines the ways discourses express, confirm, instantiate or constitute ideologies. It is discussed that in production and comprehension of discourse, ideologies usually operate at first indirectly through group members' ideologically biased mental models of social events. These personal representations of events then interact with (possibly also ideologically biased) context models that construe a communicative situation. And both kinds of models will finally give rise to the ongoing production of ideological text and talk.Within the multidisciplinary theory of CDA, the thesis also links ideologies with social practices and discourse, at the micro-level of social interactions, on the one hand; and with groups, institutions, organizations, and group relations (esp. power and dominance), at the macro level, on the other hand. Ideologies imbue in many of everyday social practices of individuals, most significantly in discourse.As soon as people act as members of social groups, they are likely to bear their ideologies in their actions and interactions. And ideologies function at macro level as the mental dimension of either the power of dominant groups over dominated groups, or the resistance of the dominated to the dominant. They provide the principles by which these forms of power abuse or resistance may be justified, legitimized or accepted.The final objective of the thesis is the analysis of English science news ideologically. Like any other forms of media discourse, science news report also relates itself to its own institutional and economic circumstances. And it seems to be even more easily affected by political, commercial or scientific institutions and organizations. Hence, a piece of science news is usually written in favor of interests of certain groups, such as government officials in charge of science and technology policies, commercial enterprises concerned with high-tech products, and scientists themselves, etc, and thus may imply their ideologies.The last two parts are devoted to explain in detail how ideologies may influence the structures of discourse. According to van Dijk, the overall strategy of most ideological discourses is to emphasize positive things of ingroups and negative things of outgroups. The writer thus selects some linguistic elements that are most easily orientated by ideology, and explains how they typically exercise such a strategy. It is suggested that the critical discourse analysis should be deployed specifically in five aspects, namely, the textual structure, semantics, syntactic structure, lexis and rhetoric. And then the linguistic analysis must be related to the social context, so that the particular social relations may be revealed. In the end, a sample analysis is provided in order to help those readers unfamiliar with CDA form a concrete idea of how it...