Critical Discourse Analysis Of English Political News Reports

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was developed by Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress, etc. from the late 1970s. It focuses on social problems, and especially on the role of discourse in the production and reproduction of power abuse or domination. It seeks to reveal the ideology and power relations which are hidden in public discourses and to expose the counteraction of public discourses on the formation of people's ideology. Public discourses refer to data like news reporting, political speeches, official documents, and so on. Political news reports are a specific kind of public discourses. They are official discourses and are inevitably influenced by domain ideologies.The present study aims to reveal the dialectical relationships between language and ideology concealed in political news reports. Based on Fairclough's three-dimensional model and Halliday's systemic-functional grammar, this thesis carries out a critical analysis of political news reports taken from famous newspapers in the United States and the UK to uncover some ideologies people are not usually consciously aware of.Fairclough divids discourse into three dimensions: texts, interactions and contexts. Text, which is used for both written texts and spoken texts, is a product of social interaction. The formal properties of a text could be on the one hand trace of the productive process, and on the other the interpretative process. In the social interaction, people draw on their knowledge of language, representations of the natural and social worlds they live in, values, beliefs, assumptions, and so on. Such process is socially determined and conditioned. Corresponding to these dimensions, three stages of CDA are distinguished: description, interpretation, and explanation. Description is concerned with the formal properties of the text—properties of vocabulary, grammar, textual structure, etc. Interpretation is concerned with the relationship between textand interaction, or seeing the text as a product of a process of production, and as a resource in the process of interpretation. Explanation is concerned with the relationship between interaction and social context—with the social determination of the process of production and interpretation and their social effects (Fairclough, 1989:24-26). Halliday's systemic-functional grammar is the major methodological resource of CDA. Halliday believes that the nature of language is closely related to the functions it has to serve. The particular form taken by the grammatical system of language is closely related to the social and personal needs that language is required to serve. So language is social and is not a transparent medium for communication about an objective world. Halliday posits language as a social and interactive phenomenon performs three functions, namely, ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The three functions of language provide a useful prediction of what types of linguistic construction will be particularly revealing for CDA.The present study lays stress on the practical critical analysis of political news reports based on Fairclough's three-dimensional model and Halliday's systemic-functional grammar. During the analysis of the samples, this paper mainly analyzes transitivity, voice, nominalization and classification in terms of ideational function, modality in terms of interpersonal function and thematic choice and intertextuality in terms of textual function. CDA emphasizes the social context because critical interpretation requires historical context. This paper deals with these formal structures of language in the social context and then reveals the hidden ideologies in language.This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction. Chapter Two is literature review of previous research carried out abroad and at home. Chapter Three gives an introduction of some key concepts in CDA and a theoretical framework of analyzing political news reports is conducted, primarily drawing upon Fairclough's three-dimensional framework and Halliday's systemic-functional grammar. Chapter Four dwellson the detailed analysis of five political news reports based on the framework discussed in Chapter Three. In Chapter Five, the implications of CDA in our country's foreign language education are discussed.