The Order Of Discourse In Public Discussion: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of A News Media Forum

Applying the theories and methods of critical discourse analysis, the present thesis investigates the order of discourse in public discussion. Based on Foucault's concept"order of discourse", with Fairclough's discursive practice approach as the analytical framework and Halliday's systemic functional grammar and presupposition in Pragmatics as the analytical tools, the study analyses both the questionnaire of the new holiday system released on the official website of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the news media forum on the holiday overhaul organized by Beijing Review. Through systematic analysis, it is found that: 1) the questionnaire on the proposal of NDRC to change the holiday system is promotional genre, which makes use of various discursive strategies and linguistic devices, such as interrogative clauses, attributive relational processes, marked Themes and presuppositions, to help put the draft plan into effect. 2) The public discussion of the holiday overhaul is, on the one hand, a governmental discourse and, on the other hand, a public discourse. The two different voices do not carry equal weight in the forum, since the governmental discourse is dominant while the public discourse is marginal. Besides, the forum does not come out of the blue, it is framed by several online polls, a series of news reports and interviews. All these different kinds of genres form a genre chain, and this intensity of management of genre chain is itself promotional. Further, the discourse to represent the new holiday system and the promotional genre are used to produce the media forum. And the forum is a re-contextualization of the public discussion. Beijing Review makes clear its own stand that May Day holiday should be cancelled by the transformation of the public discourse. 3) The holiday overhaul is authoritatively represented both in the questionnaire and in the forum as a nonnegotiable policy which must be responded to in certain ways and a simple fact to which there is no alternative.