A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Xi’an International Horticultural Exposition Propaganda Film

With the fast development of China‘s economy and the enhancement ofcomprehensive national power, the international status of China has dramatically changed.Therefore, more and more international events are held in China. The InternationalHorticultural Expo held in Xi‘an city in2011has also attracted much attention both athome and abroad. In order to promote this event successfully and efficiently, the sponsorshave produced several propaganda films to promote the image of the city as well as theevent. Their purposes are to make the audiences respond—to make them participate in, payattention to or go to see the Expo and so on. This thesis chooses two of these films as theresearch subject and uses Halliday‘s systematic-functional grammar as the analytic tool tocritically analyze the discourses of the propaganda films from the perspective of the threemetafunctions of language: ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction and textualmetafunction. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has aroused the interest of many scholarsall over the world, and it has developed fast in China in recent years.This paper aims to find out the hidden ideology and the relationship between ideologyand propaganda film by analyzing the two propaganda films from the perspective o f CDA.While making the analysis, the author studies the details of three systems of language:transitivity, mood and theme whose analytic units are clauses on the basis of threemetafunctions, so as to reveal how the powerful groups use propaganda film to reinforcethe ideology and acquire profound insights of the position and attitude in the discourse.From the research, the writer has found that nowadays, propaganda films have been widelyused in our daily lives, including political and social areas. And the language the filmsemploy plays a vital role in the process of propagation. The producers have chosen thelanguage elaborately so as to achieve their goal of propagating as well as display relativelyobvious ideology.Through the discussion of the analyzed result, this paper further puts forward thetheoretical and practical value. At present, CDA has been applied to a wide range of areas,but most of the analysts‘analyzing subject is the one where ideology is obviously shown,like news report or public speech, and little work has been done to propaganda film.However, in fact, its role no matter in the propagation activities in our daily lives or in the political propagation cannot be neglected. Therefore, a study of it is a supplement to CDAand the audiences‘critical awareness can be improved by analyzing it.