A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On China's Food Safety In American Newspapers

Food safety is directly related to the survival and development of human beings. The events of foodsafety in China have attracted great attention from the international media. What these media have reportedon China's food safety and how they have depicted China's image are worth studying. This researchquantitatively and qualitatively analyzes the news reports on China's food safety in American newspapersfrom the perspective of critical discourse analysis based on corpus linguistics.By collecting the news reports on China's food safety dated from2007to2011, from the three mostpopular news websites: The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, the authorbuilt up a mini-corpus. This research adopts Fairclough's three-dimensional model as the theoreticalframework and corpus linguistics methods with the combination of Halliday's systemic-functional grammarto make a detailed analysis at the levels of text, discursive practice and social practice.(1) At the level oftext, the linguistic features are analyzed from two aspects. One is thematic analysis, which gets a generalpicture of the lexical and semantic network of China's food safety in American newspapers. The other istransitivity analysis, which mainly focuses on material process and relational process.(2) At the level ofdiscursive practice, the analysis of discourse representation includes the reported sources and the reportingmodes.(3) At the level of social practice, historical, cultural and political factors are examined to explainthe ideology embedded in the news reports.The research finds that the news reports, commonly regarded as neutral, do not reflect the objectivereality. The choice of language is the product of special ideologies and social relations. The news reports onChina's food safety in American newspapers are far from value-free, which intend to build a negativeimage of China. The reasons for these negative attitudes towards China are the historical, cultural andpolitical differences between China and America. This research also proves that the combination of corpuslinguistics and critical discourse analysis has both macro-level analysis and micro-level analysis, whichobjectively and completely exposes the underlying ideologies.The implications of this research are listed as follows:(1) It is a beneficial attempt to apply corpuslinguistics to critical discourse analysis, which incorporates the quantitative analysis to the qualitative analysis.(2) It may help promote readers' critical reading in news reading.(3) It would be helpful incultivating the teachers' and students' critical language awareness in the foreign languages teaching andlearning.