| Critical discourse analysis (hereinafter referred to as CDA) explores the ideology underlying linguistic structures through analyzing linguistic features and the social & historical contexts herein, uncovers relations of the ideological control and government hidden in discourse, and finds out the specific roles of discourse in reinforcing control and government. In CDA, discourse has been viewed as part of social practice and it's accentuated that through discourse analysis social analysis can be better conducted.VOA, one of the world's largest news broadcast organizations, has a possession of an enormous number of audience including English learners and hence tremendous influence across the world. As an organ of the U.S. government and in behalf of the USA, VOA is bound to convey the U.S. ideology through the world and affect news adjustment of the world audience.The Tibetan problem is reckoned a weighty and sensitive topic for China. The 14th Dalai Lama, the current Tibetan religious leader and the head of Tibetan government in exile, asks for Tibetan independence on the pretext of pursuing 'genuine self-government'and stages enormous disruptive activities against the Chinese central government, which are unfavorable to the stability of Tibet and even affect the safety of a 1,200,000-square km territory of China on the Tibetan Plateau. The USA is the world's most powerful capitalist country. In light of the power of the USA and the extensive international influence of VOA news reports, the attitudes of the USA over the Tibetan problem and the images of the Tibetan side and the Beijing side portrayed in VOA news reports are supposed to affect the attitudes of other countries over the Tibetan problem and the image of China across the world to some extent. Therefore, it's necessary for us to conduct a critical analysis on a large number of Tibet-related VOA news reports to reveal the ideology of the USA over the Tibetan problem underlying the news reports.Among the studies of political discourses based on the transitivity theory, most researchers undertake research on a few or dozens of news reports from distinct media in a comparative or an individual way and few analyze a considerable number of news reports from a single medium on a quantitative and qualitative basis.On the basis of the analysis above, the author of the thesis chose at random 90 pieces of Tibet-related news from the official VOA news website, built a small-scale corpus, employed the transitivity theory in Systemic Functional Grammar as the analysis tool in the three-dimensional framework proposed by Fairclough-text, discursive practice and social practice, and conducted a quantitative and qualitative analysis on the 90 pieces of VOA news from three aspects-description, interpretation and explanation with an aim to explore what ideology the VOA in behalf of the USA conveys on the Tibetan problem, how it is expressed by language and why the USA holds such ideology.The findings of the thesis are as follows:firstly, that the ideology of the USA manifested through the Tibet-related VOA news bears close relations to the portrayal of images of the Beijing side and the Tibetan side. VOA reports tend to uglify the image of the Beijing side and beautify that of the Tibetan side. US attitude to the Tibetan problem is bound to shape the views of the world on China to some extent and affect the judgment and evaluation of the world audience on China and hence the normal exchanges between China and the other countries. Secondly, the ideology of the USA manifested in VOA reports over the Tibetan problem has deep social roots. Under the pretext of'the human rights problem'in Tibet, the USA backs up the Dalai side, intervenes in China's internal affairs and imposes pressure on Chinese government in an effort to achieve the goals of spoiling China's stability and splitting China's territory. That stems from the differences of the USA and China in basic political and economic systems, from the commercial nature of US media and from the influence of the international and China's domestic environment.The significance of this thesis is in supporting the feasibility of applying the transitivity theory to analyze broadcast news and reveal the hidden ideology herein and confirming the effectiveness of employing the quantitative and qualitative methods in corpus to CDA; in uncovering the severe prejudice of the VOA reports over the Tibetan problem; and in fostering the critical thinking of English learners reading through news reports, bolstering their sensitivity of political discourse and reinforcing readers'awareness of resisting the ideological control of mass media. |
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