Ideology And Power

With several decades of development, a new trend has been showing up in the field of discourse analysis: more and more scholars have diverted their attention to the practicality of language study. Meeting the requirement of the new trend, critical discourse analysis or critical linguistics comes into being. Since its birth, this young discipline has advanced rapidly despite difficulties. Its direction of study has been acknowledged by most discourse analysts."Critical linguistics", which was developed by Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress, etc. from the late 1970s, is based mainly on Halliday's systemic-functional grammar. It seeks to reveal the ideology and power relations hidden in public discourses and the counteraction of public discourses on the formation of people's ideology. Nowadays, news is playing a more and more important role. The functions of news are double: on one hand, it facilitates exchanging and sharing of information; on the other hand, news reports are official discourses and are inevitably influenced by domain ideologies, so they can affect and control people's cognition directly or indirectly and remain a significant factor in the formation of people's ideologies and attitudes, though the ideologies cloaked in them are less obvious than those in other public discourses such as editorial, news analysis and advertisements, etc.Adopting the theory of critical linguistics, this paper analyzes the English news from different newspapers, employing transitivity, modality, classification, speech reporting, i.e. the most frequently used analytic tools in critical linguistics to reveal ideology hidden in several discourses. It aims at enhancing readers'critical awareness and providing them with a set of analytic methods to read critically in their daily life.This paper consists of five chapters.Chapter One gives an introduction of critical linguistics, including its...