Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Type A H1N1 Influenza-from The Perspective Of Intertextuality

Critical discourse analysis, whose essential task is to investigate the interrelationship between language and ideology, has aroused scholar interests of linguists both at home and abroad since its birth. However, the researcher finds that it is limited in the description of ideological representations in different discourse types. So this study chooses disease-related news as targeted language material, aiming to explore the ideological stance embedded in this type of news discourse which is closely related with people's physical health and lives. The meaning of ideology in this study, different from that in Marxist view or traditional critical linguists' view, refers to the reporter'way of stating and appraising the happenings, to be specific, it refers to whether the reporter is reporting objectively or blending subjective attitude into objective statement. So the research focus of this thesis is whether there is subjective appraisal apart from objective statement on the part of the reporter.In line with Xin Bin's classification of intertextuality into specific one and generic one and his definition of specific intertextuality:the nature of a discourse containing speech with specific and clear source from other texts, this study divides specific news discourse into two groups:the reporter's voice and others'voice, and employs Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as analytic tools, attempting to find whether there are any differences between the reporter's voice and others' voice in aspects of transitivity, modality and thematic choice and how these differences avail the reporter of fusing subjective appraisal into news reporting.The research findings demonstrate the existence of the differences. For example, the Actors in the reporter's voice are mainly related with the virus, attempting to give objective statement of the event. However, in others' voice the Actors are primarily about people, the use of personal pronouns and the face-to-face communication effect it has achieved narrow down the psychological distance between the sayer and the readers, leaving readers an impression of being valued and hence making the expression of subjective attitude more acceptable. Generally speaking they can be ascribed to the social responsibilities of the reporter, the writing purpose and different communicative goals of the news and prove that the reporter could blend subjective appraisal into objective statement through purposefully making quotations form others.The implication of this research lies in the following three aspects:firstly, Xin Bin's definition of specific intertextuality is employed in the analysis in this study and it is proved that comparison of the intra and outer voice in specific discourse is conducive to disclose the hidden intentions of speaker or writer; secondly, the researcher finds by listing and classifying the participants in the main type of processes in transitivity and closely analyzing the use of modality and thematic choice in real context, the intentions of the discourse author and the hidden relationship between language and ideology can be disclosed more clearly. It can be concluded that combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis could be widely applied in future critical analysis; lastly, the author recommends the further critical analysis of discourse which is rarely touched by former researchers and of which the ideological meanings are more implicitly embedded.