Messages Behind Economic News

This thesis is a case study of economic news discourse from a critical perspective. The study is based on the assumption that language and ideology share an intimate and dialectic relationship. Thus, the objective of the current paper is to uncover the hidden ideological messages behind the economic news samples under discussion.The author tries to set up a multidisciplinary and comprehensive framework, in which two news articles about the Chinese economy from The New York Times are analyzed in a through way. The analysis is conducted at three stages: description, interpretation and explanation. Stage One is the description of distinctive language features in ideational, interpersonal and textual aspects, on the basis of systemic functional grammar. Stage Two is the interpretation of the pre-eminent linguistic features within the social context. The interpretation is a comprehensive one in that it covers two aspects: the sociocognitive aspect and the intertextual aspect. Finally Stage Three is the explanation of the hidden ideologies on the basis of the results of the previous two stages and further consideration of relevant socio-historical factors. It is concluded that language in the sample news reports is invested with the predominant ideologies of advocation of capitalism and priority of national interests at various levels.The whole study is an ideology-revealing process and it is also hoped that this study can provide some implications for pedagogical application. In the present case, the critical reading of economic news reports and further discussion of critical language awareness are covered at the end.