Intercultural Study On The Reports Of Ye Shiwen’s Performance In2012London Olympic Games From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

On the basis of Intercultural Communication and Critical Discourse Analysis theory, this thesis aims to conduct a comparative intercultural analysis on thirty sample reports from China Daily, The New York Times, and The Times, The Guardian, about the event of Ye Shiwen’s performance in London Olympics.Owing to different economic basis, social contexts and culture values, there exist great divergences between Eastern and Western ideologies which lead to the discrepancy of the understanding of the same event. Critical Discourse Analysis Theory is proposed by Fowler Robert Louis in the book Language and Control in1979. It is a discourse analysis model adopting a three-dimensional framework (descriptive, interpretative, and explanative), which is employed in the thesis to reveal and analyze the ideologies in news reports from China and western media. Through three levels of the analysis on thirty pieces of news reports, the author of this thesis elaborates on the relationship between the discourse and the hidden ideology behind the language. From the perspective of cultural transmission, some prestigious scholars pointed out that media itself is ideology and it is used to express the will of ruling class, and they hold that language plays a significant role in the construction of social power. Critical Discourse Analysis is utilized in the paper to analyze the relation between language and power with the aim at investigating the potential impact of the unequal relationship on readers. The study finds out that although news reports claim to be objective and fair, they are inevitably influenced by ideas and ideology. A case in point is the report about Ye Shiwen in2012London Olympics. Western media intend to build China’s negative image through this event.Through the comparison of the reports from China, Britain and America on Ye Shiwen’s performance in London Olympics, the author analyzes the ideology behind the news discourse. Under the three levels of Critical Discourse Analysis Theory, the author employed Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as the analytic tool. The first level is the description stage, which goes with classification, transitivity and modality. The second level is the detailed analysis on10Chinese reports,10British reports and10American reports from the perspective of intertextuality. The third level is the comparative analysis of ideology behind the language based on the social context. The thesis studies how the western media and Chinese media reported on Ye Shiwen’s performance in London Olympic Games, and discusses the hidden relationships between language and ideology in social context. The limitation of this thesis is followed by the conclusion.