A Contrastive Study Of Broadcast News In English And Chinese

Critical discourse analysis (CDA), as an important approach to the analysis of language, has drawn great attention of linguistics world. The present study aims to investigate the similarities and differences between broadcast news on China National Radio (CNR) and Voice of America (VOA), to analyze how the language used in these discourses influences the listener's understanding of them, and finally to help them formulate their own judgment.The research methodology employed in this study is a combination of systemic-functional grammar and critical discourse analysis. Based on Fairclough's theoretical framework, a critical discourse analysis of the broadcast news was conducted so as to explore the ideology, power, and access behind the news. The analyses examined the way in which language is used by the press as a powerful social institution that produces discourse to represent the political voices of the nation. More importantly, the critical discourse analyses demonstrated how news can be conceived of as discourse and how one might infer media effects from linguistic features; and provided a textual warrant for interpretation to get some insights into the nature of media text, particularly form and content. Lexical classification, transitivity, and thematic choice are in focus.The discourses chosen are the sub-variety of mass media discourses—broadcast news, which is an important mode to convey the political voices. Data collected include six pieces of news taken from CNR and VOA respectively within two weeks, which are all about North Korea nuclear testing. Corpus-based, the study reveals that in broadcast news, reporters use some techniques to embed their attitudes and ideologies in the discourses. The contrastive analyses suggest that the CNR and VOA news share some similarities in transitivity and thematic choice, while they differ in classification, transformation and speech reporting.The thesis is a preliminary study on the contrastive analysis of broadcast news from CDA perspective, providing readers, especially university students in China with a critical thinking approach, so that they can develop their critical language awareness when listening to broadcast news in English.