A Contrastive Analysis Of News Reports On Google's Pullout From China In Chinese And American Newspapers

Critical discourse analysis (CDA), an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse, aims to reveal the discursive sources of power, dominance and bias and how these sources are initiated, reproduced and transformed within specific social, economic, political and historical contexts. News discourse, carrying abundant information, unarguably becomes an important research target of CDA practitioners who have accumulated invaluable analytical theories and methods on news discourse analysis.Under the framework of Fairclough's three-dimensional model and the analytical tools of Halliday's functional grammar, this thesis is devoted to a detailed contrastive analysis on the ten sample news reports concerning Google's pullout from China extracted from People's Daily and New York Times. Corresponding to the dimensions of Fairclough's model, the study is conducted from three aspects:description, interpretation and explanation. The categories of lexical classification and transitivity are described and compared at the linguistic level; discursive strategies involving modes of discourse representation and news sources are studied at the stage of interpretation; and the contributing factors of the differences are tentatively explained from the social and other determinants.Through the comparative study, it is found that there is a great difference in language properties in the two newspapers. The existing differences show that the assorted opinions out of different newspapers on the same issue rest on the varied ideology originated from the governmental institution, which is shaped by and in turn reproduces and reinforces the social structure.The present study testifies the effectiveness of the proposed framework and shows it is powerful for exploring ideologies hidden in the language of news discourses. And the author also points out the pedagogical implications of CDA by applying critical approach into the educational program to cultivate Chinese students' language awareness in critical reading. It is also suggested that an examination into the change of ideology and the mutual interaction between discourse and the readers can be conducted through studying the different types of Chinese discourse in a period of time from critical perspective. It is also hoped that more researches will be achieved in integrating the linguistic and other social theories with a view to perfect critical discourse analysis of news discourse.