Identity Construction In H1N1News Report

H1N1flu, first mis-defined as swine influenza, is an epidemic. The first contracted case occurred in Mexico in the middle of April2009, which arouses the people’s attention at once. People from all walks of life dedicate into the battle of fighting H1N1. Media, an essential form of sending information, report the current development of H1N1flu in time. However, various media have their own distinct ways of making the reports. In front of so many different media, which one is worth trusting perplexes the audience. How and why the media arrange the discourse in the way it presents is the discourse analysts’concern. The Critical Discourse Analysts combine the readers’ harassment with their own thoughts, intending to find out the reason, method along with the beneficiary for the media to deal with the discourse in a certain mode.This study is going to use RSA (Representation of Social Actors) by van Leeuwen to comparatively analyze three kinds of identities including the governmental and international organizations, the patients and the medical experts in the H1N1news report from the China Daily (CD) and New York Times (NYT). The principle purpose of this study is to test the feasibility of the RSA, and find out the reasons for the differences between these two newspapers, offering a new way to the reader to discern the reliability of the reports from a critical perspective. Thus as a result, this research solves three questions put forth during the survey, i.e. what identities they have constructed? How to construct the identities? What are the differences between the identities built up in CD and NYT?The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one makes a brief introduction of the study, including the background, aims and significance. Chapter two sketches out the theoretical foundation of this thesis, such as literature review of previous study on identity in discourse and the feasibility of this thesis. Chapter three is about the methodological considerations of this study. It will present the data resources—what kind of data it is (H1N1flu), where is the data from (CD&NYT), and how to collect the corpus. Besides, it introduces the theory RSA by van Leeuwen in detail. Chapter four deals with the practical use of RSA, which is divided into three aspects:identity construction of H1N1authorities in CD and NYT, identity construction of H1N1patients in CD and NYT and identity construction of H1N1medical experts in CD and NYT. Chapter five is responsible for the conclusion of this study, which contains summary of the present study and implications of the findings. And at last, limitations of this study and suggestions of the further research are offered.