A Critical Analysis Of Migrant Workers’ Collective Identity Construction In Journalistic Discourse

Journalistic discourse, as a typical genre of media discourse, is generally thought to be objective and neutral in reporting social life. On the other hand, collective identity is "a place in the social world"(Simon&Klandermans2001, p.320), one that is shared with a group of others who have (or are believed to have) some characteristics in common. The construction of collective identity in journalistic discourse provides a way to explore the identity of a certain social group. The present study tries to present an approach to analyze the construction of collective identities in journalistic discourse from a critical perspective.The author proposes that journalistic discourse by no means reflects the world objectively, but is ideological; to be more specific, the collective unconsciousness of journalists influence the way migrant workers’collective identity is constructed and interpreted. Therefore, a social-cognitive interpretation of migrant workers’collective identity, which is represented in linguistic and semiotic features including process types, evaluation and intertextuality in thirty news reports concerning migrant workers in The People’s Daily, is conducted within the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar to ascertain how migrant workers’collective identities are constructed in texts. The thesis first reviews different approaches to collective identity and previous study on news discourse from the perspective of CDA and finds that few critical researches about collective identity are conducted. Then, the analytical framework of this thesis is presented, which includes transitivity system, appraisal theory and intertextuality. Through a detailed analysis of thirty news reports selected from Chinese People’s Daily, it achieves the following three conclusions:firstly, all process types are employed in the thirty news reports. Material process, verbal process and relational process are much more preferred by journalists to present migrant workers as social actors of doing and being. Secondly, there are rich appraisal resources in the thirty news reports of migrant workers. Among the three categories of attitude resources, Attitude accounts for the largest proportion as against the total number of appraisal resources, which is followed by engagement and graduation. Furthermore, the distribution of the subcategories for each subsystem is also not equal. Thirdly, both manifest intertextuality and constitutive intertextuality are employed in the thirty news reports. For manifest intertextuality, cliche and quotation is the main linguistic feature; for constitutive intertextuality, generic and thematic intertexuality are borrowed by journalists to align themselves with each other.The critical study of collective identities in this paper proves to be significant both in theory and practice. Theoretically, the study conducted under the framework of Systemic Functional Grammar, Appraisal Theory and intertextuality in the thirty news reports in The People’s Daily concerning migrant workers examines how migrant workers’collective identities are constructed in journalistic texts from a critical perspective. Practically, this study is of meaningful help for readers to keep a critical awareness of journalistic discourse as well as other discourse types.