A Critical Discourse Analysis Of English News Reports

Critical linguistics is also called critical language study (CLS) or critical discourse analysis (CDA). It was first put forward in their work Language and Control in 1979 by British linguists Fowler, etc., and is one of the methods of discourse analysis.As we all know, discourse analysis is a newly-developed discipline of the study of language in use and belongs to inter-discipline science. Modern discourse analysis categorizes the analytic methods as five types: structural discourse analysis, cognitive discourse analysis, social cultural discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, and integrative discourse analysis. Different method follows different linguistic theory and focuses on its own research aspect.The main objectives of critical discourse analysis are public discourses from television, advertisements, newspapers, official documents, laws, etc. The aim is to reveal, at the angles of linguistics, sociology, mass media, and psychology, the relation between discourse, ideology and power: ideology influences the structure of discourse; conversely, and discourse reacts on ideology; both discourse and ideology are determined by social elements, such as social structures and power relations and are in the service of them. The establishment and development of critical discourse analysis is the achievement in language study. Meanwhile, it meets the needs of practice in the'epoch of information'. At present, critical discourse analysis is still at the stage of development, and there are problems waiting to be solved.Critical discourse analysis puts forward its distinctive view of language: discourse is social practice; discourse is determined by social elements and has effects upon them; the production and interpretation of the text are the result of the interaction with social contexts. Fairclough (2001:6) criticized the trend of the pure positivism in linguistics, which overemphasizes the objective description of the facts, paying too much attention to'what'question but neglecting'why'and'how'questions. Hence the task for critical linguists is to answer these'why'and'how'questions in the social and historical contexts.Critical linguistics has been influenced by Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which argues that...