A Critical Analysis Of The Discourse On China's Intellectual Property Protection In Daily Newspapers Of China And America

Based on Fairclough's three-dimensional model and van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach to CDA, the present thesis is about a critical analysis of the news reports about China's intellectual property right (IPR) protection in the daily newspapers of China and America. The analysis is based on two self-built corpora– Chinese News Texts (CNT) and American News Texts (ANT), each consisting of news reports dating from January 2009 to June 2011, with 40 texts in CNT and 24 in ANT. All the reports are collected from daily newspapers from China and America, such as China Daily, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Both quantitative and qualitative modes of analysis are combined in the study. The headlines and body texts of the news reports are analyzed respectively in the general way, and then two pairs of samples are chosen to be analyzed in a more detailed way. The main analytical tools used are lexicalization, transitivity, transformation and intertextuality.After detailed analysis of the linguistic features of the texts in the two corpora, differences are found to outweigh similarities. The different topics preferred by the newspapers of the two countries, the concordance patterns of"piracy", the choice of different news sources and reporting verbs reflect that the discourse is obviously ideology-motivated. The discursive strategy used is ideological polarization between ingroups and outgroups, which is a general strategy of positive self-presentation (boasting) and negative other-presentation (derogation). The American newspapers put emphasis on the negative aspects of China's IPR protection, whereas China Daily, acknowledging the existing problems, focuses on the positive aspects. The motive hidden behind is different ideologies of the newspapers and the two governments.The present study proves that CDA is a powerful tool to find out the relationship between ideology and discourse. It is hoped that this thesis can help expand the application of CDA and raise readers' critical awareness in interpreting Western media.