A Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese And English News Discourses From A Cda Perspective

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA, originated from Critical Linguistics), developed in the late 1970's and early 1980's, is a new discourse analysis approach and new subdiscipline of modern linguistics. CDA tries to study the relations between language, power and ideology by analyzing the text, aiming to disclose how the text produces or reproduces power, control and inequality under the social, political and cultural backgrounds. As a multi-disciplinary perspective of discourse analysis, CDA gradually attracts attention from linguists and scholars of different disciplines. This thesis adopts Halliday's three Metafunctions as the theoretical foundation, presenting a contrastive discourse analysis of Chinese and American news reports on "Toyota recall" event on three levels posed by Fairclough---text, discursive practice and social practice.There are three questions to be answered in the study:(1) what are the general lexical and syntactical features of Chinese and English texts? (2) How does discursive practice "produce", "distribute" and "consume" the text? (3) How do the English and Chinese news reports show their different ideologies and power relationships? Three questions, respectively independent but closely related, correspond with Fairclough's three dimensions. First of all, with a great amount of quantitative evidence, a contrastive analysis of Chinese and English news texts in transitivity, classification, transformation, modality and thematic choice is conducted. Secondly, a combination of quantitative and qualitative study on the sources of texts, the modes of reporting, and the transformation of subject positions is elaborated according to Xin Bin's division of intertextuality (specific intertextuality and generic intertexuality). Finally, this thesis gives a qualitative analysis on the relations between language, power and ideology based on the findings of the first two questions.With a contrastive analysis of four Chinese and four English samples, the major findings are as follows:the Chinese and American media have their own tendencies and focuses when reporting Toyota recall event. On the one hand, an extensive coverage of reactions from Toyota and the American government and media can be found in Chinese media reports; however, the Chinese media seldom report attitudes of the Chinese media, government or customers and mostly criticize Toyota Company in a tolerant way. On the other hand, the American media show a comparatively strong power position by providing a wide coverage of negative descriptions of Toyota and sharp reprobative voices from the American government and customers.With the explanation of theories and sample analysis on news reports, the author proves the applicability of CDA to Chinese news texts. Meanwhile, the author hopes to help readers cultivate a new critical reading approach and improve their critical awareness of ideology hidden behind the lines by revealing the effect of power and ideology on language; furthermore, the study also offers some insights for readers into the discourse judgment of different news texts from different countries and media so as to avoid being controlled and mislead by some superficially objective and neutral discourse.