| As the development of the world economy globalization, the relationships betweencountries become closer and closer, and the impact of disaster on human being broadensdramatically. Thus, people’s attention to disaster news reports becomes higher andhigher. The dissemination of disaster news reports can not only make clear the disasterevent itself, but also guide the masses and encourage or frustrate people’s attitudestoward the disaster. Therefore, disaster news is worth of researchers’ concern and study.Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) discusses the relations among language, powerand ideology. It aims at revealing the ideology that hidden beneath the discoursethrough the analysis of surface language form. News discourse has always been the areaof concern of CDA. The focus of former research is mainly on political news discoursebut seldom on disaster news, especially seldom on Chinese disaster news.Whereas all these mentioned, this thesis chooses the most influential disasters thathappened in China in recent years as the news events, constructs two corpora bycollecting English news reports written both by American media and Chinese media onthese events to do a critical discourse analysis. The research takes aim at answering thefollowing four questions:1) What are the similarities and differences of the linguisticcharacteristics between American English news and Chinese English news whennarrating a disaster event?2) Why do American media and Chinese media choose suchdiscourses to report the same disaster event?3) Why do American media and Chinesemedia promote such ideology and how it is realized and reinforced in the two countries’news discourses?4) How do these news discourses reflect China image and the changeof Sino-US relations?By the means of quantitative and qualitative methods, this thesis does the corpus-based critical discourse analysis with utilizing Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Modelfor CDA and combining Systemic Functional Grammar as well as Van Dijk’s SocialCognitive Theory to explore the relations among language, power and ideology and reveal how the discourse producer realize their political purpose by choosing differentdiscourse strategies to spread their will and view. The purpose of this thesis is toimprove people’s language awareness, resolving ability and critical ability in newsreading so that people can objectively treat the event which they have read from thenews report. |
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