A Critical Analysis Of Notice Discourse

The thesis analyzes the Chinese government notices from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. The purposes of this thesis are to describe the formal features of notice discourse and display the ideology and power relation interactions between the notice regulators and practioners. The analysis is basically synchronic and quantitative and the data for analysis include nine government notices of five different types (two instructional, two comment&transmission, two promulgated, one meeting notice and two appointments) with about20,000words. Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is the theoretical foundation for this analysis. Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework for critical discourse analysis, together with Halliday’s functional grammar, serves as the main analytical tools for the analysis of the data. In the first dimension "Discourse as text", the formal linguistic features of the notice discourse are described quantitatively by analyzing the transitivity processes from the perspective of CDA, through which we found that among the six types of process discerned by Halliday, material and relational processes appear most frequently by far, while the number of the expressive processes is the smallest. This is determined by the notice mission that the government endues it.In the second dimension "discursive practice", the analyst tries first to interpret the notice discourse with regard to its production, transmission and distribution through the analysis of the speech acts, and then to display the implications hidden behind it. Among these five categories of speech acts distinguished by Searle (1965), directive and representative speech acts are used most frequently, while the number of other types of speech acts is much smaller than the two above mentioned. The reason might be that government notices, which are often used to give instructions by the regulators to the practioners, and rarely show any personal emotion and the tones, are normally official and instructional. Thus the analyses of the speech acts in such discourse may manifest the power relationships between or among the notice participants.The third dimension of "social practice", the author tries to explain the findings from the analyses of the notice discourse from the perspective of how power relations of the subjects are actualized through their ideologies and notices. Through the analysis, we find that the difference of the ideologies among the participants mainly exists between the regulators and the practioners. Generally speaking, different participants in the notice interactions tend to have different ideologies because of their different purposes and interests. The power relations of notice discourse mainly have three features:1) power relations among each subject in the notice is asymmetrical and hierarchical;2) the power relations are mostly determined by the institutional nature and function of government; and3) the power relations are displayed by and in turn influence the linguistic features of the discourse of each subject.