Critical Discourse Analysis Of Political Netnews

Till the end of the year 2007, which is reported, China has had the largest number of Net-surfers in the world. Breaching the traditional notion of news transmission, the Netnews provides the readers with a brand-new experience. Readers can get the latest and wrought news through the internet, which is the trend of the Netnews. They not only want to find out the news but the essence of it, for which we make a research on critical discourse analysis (CDA) here. As a branch of linguistics, CDA, also called critical linguistics, which is right mainly on the basis of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) of Halliday, seeks to uncover the ideology and power relationship hidden in public discourses and the counteraction of them on the controlling and formation of people's ideology. In the 1990s Chen Zhongzhu etc introduced CDA into China and now CDA study is in the ascendant. Then we wonder whether the characteristics of Netnews will make it free from the influence of the ideology and whether the CDA theories can help to cultivate the critical awareness of language for the Netnews readers. The Netnews is all-inclusive, from which the thesis just chooses the political discourses as the research material.At the beginning of the thesis, the basic theoretical roots, development, some basic notions in CDA and the study of CDA at home and abroad are introduced. Then the thesis discusses what Netnews is, putting its emphasis on the political Netnews. Next the tools to be used in the practice of analyzing are displayed in detail in Chapter 3. Based on the theories and tools introduced above, the author provides a practical analysis of the 6 political Netnews reports from America and China on the event that America awarded the Dalai Lama, employing the contrastive analysis from the lays of lexical classification, transitivity, passive voice, speech presentation, thematic structure analysis and the entailment analysis, among which the entailment analysis is the author's primary attempt for CDA. Affected by different ideologies, different emphases can be found from the six lays. The purpose of the analyzing is to testify the validity of the CDA theories in this field and help to improve the understanding of political Netnews.To sum up, as a social practice, language is just an embodiment of ideology rather than the neutral and value-free medium. In the political Netnews, CDA theories can help the readers to cultivate the critical awareness of language, thereby strengthening their ability of reading comprehension and anti-controlling. Additionally, the system of CDA theories and tools is open to all the researchers because the framework of CDA has not been fixed or complete. In this thesis news source analysis and entailment analysis have proved to be valid for CDA. CDA is significant to the development of linguistics and some other subjects even to the language education at home.