A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And American Science News From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA) is also called critical linguistics,critical language study or linguistic criticism.Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress in Language and Control first introduced it as a method of linguistic analysis,van Dijk(2001) defines CDA as "a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse,dominance,and inequality are enacted,reproduced,and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context".Critical linguists argue that language can not be regarded as the neutral media of communication;it is a product of social practice.In their view,language is closely linked to ideology,because language is the commonest form of social behavior.Ideology is pervasively present in language;ideological nature of language should be one of the major themes of modern social science.From the day critical linguistics came into being,it has taken Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar as its fundamental foundations and sources of methodology.As we all know,Halliday has summarized language's three functions:ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function.Based on the three functions,critical linguists often use transitivity,modality,transformation,classification,coherence and so on as the analytical tools.Although CDA focuses on all non-literal discourses,the researchers carry out a large proportion of studies on media language and elaborated on the relationship between language, power and ideology when analyzing news report.Retrieving Chinese Periodicals,we find political news has for long been the focus of CDA,few works took science news as their objective of study.As we know,ideology exists in any kind of discourse,even scientific discourse.Each communication material can be explained by ideology.The world of today is experiencing rapid development of science and technology.People pay more attention to this field.Each day we may read from the newspaper or hear from TV that a scientific discovery is made by a scientist at home or abroad.For example,food additives,nuclear powers,clone, computer technology,air pollution and so on have attracted people's attention.Based on Halliday's systemic-functional grammar and Fairclough's three-dimensional framework,the thesis analyzes science news from the perspective of CDA. To construct the theoretical basis for the whole thesis,the researcher first introduces CDA's development and origin,and then Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar and Fairclough's three-dimensional framework are introduced in detail.Then the study focuses on the relationship between language,ideology and power relations.It concludes that everything that is written in a newspaper has to be transmitted through language.The transmission on a message through language almost of necessity encodes value into the message.The study also describes the development of news,esp.science news and the relationship between CDA and news.The main part of the thesis is devoted to the contrastive analysis of American and Chinese science news reports about Iran's nuclear issue.The thesis takes 20 authentic science news discourses as the subjects of the contrastive study.Among the materials,10 are American news(AN) from The New York Times and The International Herald Tribute while 10 are Chinese news(CN) from China Daily.The data for this thesis are the news reports started from September to December in 2008.The analysis is based on the analytical tools of lexical choice,transformation,transitivity, modality and thematic choice.On the basis of the above analysis of science news reports at various levels,we come to the conclusion that news can never be regarded as neutral,value-free chunks of language;rather they should be viewed as an embodiment of a host of institutional and political discursive practices. From the analysis,we can figure out how American and Chinese science news distinguish from each other.The two countries' science news reports employ different ways to represent Iran.The different representations manifest the stereotype and common belief each country holds towards Iran,which in turn manifest the attitude and ideology implicit in the language of newspapers.From the contrastive study of the news reports,the researcher concludes that CDA is a powerful tool for analyzing the relationship between language,power and ideology.It also proves that science news could be analyzed from the perspective of CDA.So we can say the thesis achieves the following goals:theoretically,it proves that ideology and social power also exist in science news.It also widens the research scope of CDA and contrastive analysis. Practically,it raises people's "language awareness" and their capability in appreciating and criticizing various discourses.Furthermore,it provides a new view on the teaching and learning of science news.