A Critical Discourse Analysis Of American On-line News Reports On The Execution Of Saddam Hussein

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) emerged as a form of discourse and textanalysis that recognized the role of language in constructing or constituting socialentities and power relations in 1970s. This new approach focuses on the analysis oftexts, their production and interpretation and their relation to societal impulses andstructures. It combines general social theories, discourse analysis theories andlinguistic theories together and employs an interdisciplinary research methodology.According to Fowler(1979), the aim of CDA is the critical interpretation of texts, inthe sense that recovering the social meanings expressed in discourse by analyzing thelinguistic structures in the light of their interactional and wider social contexts.Halliday's concepts of language and Systemic Functional Grammar have a greatinfluence upon the development of CDA. According to Halliday(2001), the nature oflanguage is determined by its function in the social structure, and the organization ofbehavioral meanings is rooted in its social foundations.This thesis adopts Fairclough's three-dimensional framework: description,interpretation and explanation. According to Fairclough(2001), discourse analysisconsists of three elements: text, interaction and social context. Description is the stagewhich is concerned with formal properties of the text; interpretation is concerned withthe relationship between text and interaction; explanation is concerned with therelationship between interaction and social context. So the three stages of Fairclough'sanalytical model accord with the three aspects of discourse analysis.The analyzed data of this thesis are singled out from the on-line press release ofthree major American newspapers. The topic is about the execution of SaddamHussein. The data is analyzed by qualitative method. The three media are analyzed ina contrastive manner in order to work out more comprehensive linguistic features,which carry certain hidden messages, and attain more general ideologies.The questions of this thesis are:what hidden messages are embedded in the threenewspapers and how they differ from each other; by what means the hidden messagesare recreated linguistically; what hidden ideologies are reflected by these hiddenmessages; in what way people are influenced by ideologies that have their social roots.The purposes of this thesis include three aspects. Firstly, to explain that mediadiscourses are normally ideology-oriented because of some social factors. Secondly, toexplain that ideologies can be embedded by certain linguistic features and make theinfluence of social factors on language clear. Thirdly, to explain that the reports in mass media aren't the purported objective and value-free, but ideologically-orientedand people are influence subconsciously and inevitably.Based on the analysis, it is found that although there is minor distinction amongthe three media, they all portray Saddam Hussein as a tyrant and unqualified to be theleader. They purport that Iraqi government should take responsibility for the executionand it has nothing to do with American government; it is reasonable for USA to resortto military force to solve the problem in Iraq; and it is urgent to carry out thedemocratic reform in Iraq. These hidden messages are reflected through the linguisticfeatures such as material process and nominalization. Certain ideologies can berevealed from hidden messages, such as neo-conservatism and new-militarism. That isto say ideologies could be embodied by certain form of language and at the same timerestrain it. Ideologies, on the other hand, could be chained by social cultural factors.As a result, the use of language could be restrained by social cultural factors. Theaudiences of mass media are susceptible to ideologies and are often influencedunconsciously. By the combination of Fairclough's three-dimensional framework withanalytical tools from SFL, hidden ideologies could be unveiled and the influence couldbe made clear.The significance of this thesis lies in two aspects. Firstly, it proves the dialecticalrelationship between language and social structure, that is to say, the usage of languagecould be restrained by social structure and could influence the latter; secondly, thefindings of this study is helpful in evoking people's critical awareness of language as afundamental element in contemporary social lives. The limitations of this thesis is theneed of further study to find out the ways that ideology could be changed through theuse of discourse and eventually lead to the change of social reality. In addition, thelimited amount of data and the author's interpretation of discourse could have affectedthe objectivity of the findings.