| News media play an important role in informing readers of the latest events that have happened or are happening in the world. Accordingly, news discourse has been a focus among linguists who work with language and communication. The scholars at home and abroad have made a great many researches in various fields such as functional stylistics, narratology, critical discourse analysis (hereinafter shortened as CDA) and so on. As an important way of information transmission, news reports are often presented to be impartial. However, 'relevant studies show that news reports are never objective. News reporting is mainly to serve power-holders and spread their ideology. CDA generally adopts Halliday's systemic functional grammar as it's analytical tool to reveal the hidden ideology. Currently, there is no research made in a cognitive perspective to explain how journalists manipulate readers to accept certain ideology. It would be challenging to do CDA based on cognitive linguistics. Our attention will be focused on the language of hard news reports. In a cognitive perspective, a case study will be conducted to reveal the different hidden ideologies behind news texts.In English news reports (hereinafter shortened as ENRs), it is the arrangement of words and sentence structures that mystify gist readers. This thesis attempts a cognitive study of news texts. A theoretical framework will be constructed by explaining the prominent nature of syntactic subjects, the importance of background information, metaphorical extension, energy transmission and cognitive domains. By utilizing this theoretical framework, readers may raise the awareness of understanding the deep meanings through a critical way.Based on the analysis of five news reports, there are two major findings. The first is that there are differences between these five news media. The second is that a cognitive approach to CDA is practical arid efficient. The findings are beneficial to English teaching and English-Chinese translation.This thesis consists of five chapters. They are organized as follows:Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the study, including its rationale, a glance at news, significance of the study, data collection; as well as the organization of the thesis.Chapter 2 reviews previous studies on ENRs, focusing on three approaches, namely, the functional stylistic approach, the narrative approach and the CDA approach. A retrospect of the inception and development of CDA is also provided.Chapter 3 illustrates the theoretical framework of the present study, where the figure/ground segregation theory is introduced in detail, including the prominent nature of figure, the interdependency between , figure/ground and background, metaphorical extensions, energy transmission, as well as elementary cognitive domains.Chapter 4 is the core of the thesis. It gives a detailed analysis of ENRs based on the theoretical framework given in Chapter 3. A comparative study of five ENRs will be made on the protest against the Group Eight Summit from the aspects of the choice of syntactic subjects, the ellipsis of background information, implicit power relationships, agent or instrument absence, mystification of superordinate and subordinate goals.Chapter 5 is the conclusion, which summarizes the major findings of the present study and indicates its limitations as well as suggestions for further study.In brief, this thesis limits in the sentence structures and missing information of ENRs based on a cognitive approach. Above all, the present study is refined to figure/ground segregation theory. Other cognitive perspectives are worth trying.
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