| As a new branch of modern linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis（CDA）, also calledCritical Linguistics has been drawing many scholars’ interests and attentions since its boomingin Britain in the1980s. It is a methodology of discourse analysis consisting of many disciplines,such as linguistics, sociology, politics, media studies etc. CDA focuses on the analysis on massmedia discourses which include news reports, public speeches, advertisements, officialdocuments etc. Through analyzing the features of language structures about the described storyin discourse as well as its relative social and historical background, the study of CDA canindicate the subtle relations between language, power and ideology so as to reveal how theruling class uses language to influence the public for the sake of keeping their interests andmaintaining the existing social constitution.This thesis is a contrastive analysis of twenty political reports about the Libyan war fromfour English news media: China Daily, New York Times, The Guardian, and Agence-FrancePresse. This research employs Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework as the theoreticalbasis and incorporated with Halliday’s three metafunction of grammar as the analytical tool toundertake the present contrastive analysis. In line with Fairclough’s three stepwise proceduresfor undertaking critical discourse analysis: description, interpretation and explanation, thewriter analytically compares the linguistic features of the samples from the aspects oftransitivity, transformation, classification, modality and thematic choice with the aim todemonstrate how the governments from four countries present their different attitudes andpositions on the Libyan conflict as well as the different ideologies between the lines of thenews reports.This paper chooses corpus from four essential English media to compare the linguisticstructures in order to find out both language usage and ideology differences among fourcountries, which enriches the scope and perspective of CDA. In addition, the exquisiteincorporation of Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework and Halliday’s three metafunctionof grammar in the contrastive research deepen the methodology of CDA. By applyingHalliday’s systemic functional grammar, the writer undertakes a qualitative and quantitativeanalysis in the contrastive study about the samples of news reports, and draws the conclusionthat through comparing the different linguistic structures and language features, the relationsbetween language, power and ideology are expounded. Behind the lines of different news reports, there are different hidden ideologies and intentional power of different countries.Meanwhile language is applied by the ruling classes to maintain their claimed socialconstitution. With the inherent ideology and assumption, different media report seriouspolitical issues in various ways. Conversely, different reports may transmit an imposingideology on the others. The American N.Y. Times has an influential and imposing guidance ofthe American ideology of power politics to the public. Comparatively The Guardian reports theLibyan issue in a more impartial way but may be involuntarily influenced by the Americanopinion. China Daily and Agence France-Presse are non-English native media, and they havedifferent focuses on the reported issue. The former cares more about the humanity in themilitary action, while the latter pays more attention to France’s interests and claims in dealingwith the settlement of Libyan conflict. In addition, this study helps to cultivate the Englishlearners and readers’ ideological awareness and critical comprehension when absorbinginformation from different media. |
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