| Critical linguistics (CL) was advanced by the English linguists Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress et al. in 1979. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was developed from the critical linguistics which came into being in the late 1970s and has become a hot topic in critical linguistics in recent decades. CDA mainly concerns the social issues, and studies them from a comprehensive perspective of linguistics and philosophy as well. The studies, based on Halliday's three divisions of language function:ideational, interpersonal and textual functions, have achieved great progress in particular. The current studies on CDA mainly concerns news reporting on other countries'events or contrastive analysis on the same event about China in American and British mainstream media. However, the contrast analysis of political news among American newspapers is not much discussed in the previous studies.This thesis first makes a brief summary of the establishment, the latest development and different approaches of CDA. Then it attempts to apply the theories and methodologies of CDA to the analysis of four political news reports in the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post from the aspects of classification, transformation and modality. In addition, the social and historical backgrounds of the issues are taken into consideration in analyzing the four pieces of news reports. The purpose is to see the bi-directional relationship between language and ideology from analyzing news discourses which alleged to be a neutral and objective attitude. The analysis reveals the relationship between languages, power and ideology, which is a major concern of critical linguistics from the very beginning of its birth.The main findings of this research are that different news media have different standpoints and use different words and report modes in reporting the same news event. The critical analysis of news reports is to discover the connotation of news reports through analyzing its discourses. This research can provide a new angle of view in the study of CDA, and serve as a complement for the studies of CDA. |
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