The Critical Discourse Analysis Of Political News And Its Implications For College English Writing-from The Figure-Ground Theory Perspective

Modern society has walked into the information age. The mass media, especially those inEnglish, are penetrating into all parts of life. Political news reports are the focus of people’sattention and play such a significant role in both dominating the worldwide opinion andmanipulating people’s ideologies. Political news reports may seem objective and just on page,but convey diverse ideological implications. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) aims to unveilthe implicit relationship between language, power and ideology by analyzing the linguisticsfeatures. CDA generally adopts Halliday’s systemic functional grammar as its analytical toolto reveal the hidden ideology. With the development of Cognitive Linguistics, some of itstheories have been used in the CDA study. But there is few research made from theperspective of figure-ground theory to unveil the ideologies hidden in the news reports.Figure-ground theory is one of the basic cognitive principles according to which space isorganized and it is also a basic cognitive principle of how language is organized (Kuang, Wen,2003). According to the characters of the figure-ground theory, a theoretical framework willbe constructed by explaining the prominent nature of syntactic subject, the cognitive domains,the importance of background information, metaphorical extension and energy transmission.The data used in the research is acquired on the website of the prestigious media of the UnitedStates.(The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Associated Press, TheNew York Post). By analyzing the five reports on the same event, it can be seen that there aredifferent ideologies hidden in the reports. Chicago Tribune, The New York Times and The NewYork Post think it is the protesters’ behavior that causes the clash. While Associated Press andThe Washington Post stand on the protesters’ side and hold that it is the police should beresponsible for the clash. And finally, the thesis applies the research to college Englishteaching, discussing the implications for college English writing.The thesis consists of six parts. Chapter one serves as a general introduction. The researchbackground is briefly sketched, the research questions, methodology, purpose and significanceare stated, and the organization of the whole thesis is introduced as well. Chapter two reviewsprevious studies on the critical discourse analysis of political news home and abroad andpoints out the limitations in previous research. Chapter three illustrates the theoreticalframework of the present study, where the figure-ground theory is introduced in detail,including the prominent nature of figure, elementary cognitive domains, stage metaphor,metaphorical extensions, as well as action chains. Chapter four is the core of the thesis, whichgives a detailed analysis of political news based on the theoretical framework discussed in Chapter three. A comparative study of five pieces of news on the Occupy Wall Street will bemade from the aspects of the choice of syntactic subjects, the choice of words, the ellipsis ofbackground information, implicit power relationships, and agent or instrument absence.Chapter five is about its pedagogical implications for college English writing. And finally,chapter six is the conclusion of the thesis, summing up the contents of the whole thesis,pointing out the limitations of the study, and giving suggestions for future research.