A Critical Discourse Analysis On News Reports Of Greek Referendum

Critical Discourse Analysis originates in late1970s, which aims at exposing the interactive relationship between language, power and ideology. News reports are always a hot subject for CDA, the contents of which often touch upon the inequity and partiality in the society.30pieces of news reports about Greek referendum in the European Debt Crisis are chosen from Oct.31to Nov.4in2011as the research subjects, which are collected from the websites of The Guardian and China Daily. After analyzing and labeling the materials manually, the data is obtained by the statistical tool MonoConc and SPSS. Then, combined with the CDA theory, the results are discussed based on the data.Fairclough classifies CDA into three dimensions:text, discursive practice and sociocultural practice. Based on the three dimensions, there are three levels in analyzing:description, interpretation and explanation. In the level of description, the text analysis is conducted by employing the analytic tools mainly from Systemic Functional Grammar, such as the lexical choice, transitivity and modality and MonoConc; in the level of interpretation, the processing analysis is conducted by employing the news sources and modes of representation in the intertextuality and MonoConc as well; in the level of explanation, the social analysis is conducted by relating the sociocultural background to expose the interactive relationships between language, power and ideology.The attitudes from the two presses are both negative towards the news reports of Greek referendum event. However, they are influenced by the ideology unconsciously. The Guardian are more Greece-focused, while China Daily are more Sino-EU focused.The present research is assumed to make a supplement to the present CDA research. At the meantime, it is also contributed to improving the critical awareness in reading.