Discourse And Ideology

The thesis is an investigation of the dialectical relationship between discourse structures and socio-ideological structures in the media discourse by examining U.S. press coverage of China's anti-secession law, within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).As Taiwan issue is of significant importance to the national interests of the U.S. in Asia, the subject of study, China's anti-secession law has attracted the attention of American media. Many newspapers around the country have covered this issue. As for international news, it has been argued that media's representation of international events and stories for the most part corresponds to the foreign policy of the state (van Dijk, 1998). If that is true, then the representations and interpretations of China's adoption of anti-secession law in the U.S. press could be reflective of the views held by U.S. policy makers. The assumption inspires the interests in the present research.The data for this study consists of news reports from two leading newspapers in the U.S.: the New York Time and the Washington Post, collected in March 2005. Data analysis is conducted within Fairclough's three-dimensional framework. There are three analytical focuses in analyzing focuses in analyzing any communicative event. In the dimension of text, the linguistic strategies are described under the headings of transitivity, lexical classification, modality, thematic structure. In the dimension of discursive practice, speech reporting is discussed to study the production process of news reports. Besides, the implication of linguistic strategies is interpreted with reference to underlying socio-ideological context. In the dimension of social practice, the data is situated in social and institutional context to justify the interpretation.