A Contrastive Analysis Of Positive Discourse Of China Daily And New York Times

Media discourse, as a social practice is the location of different ideology and all kinds of power orregulations, at the same time also reflects the different culture background and policy system, so that it has longbeen a focus and an important source of discourse. Jim Martin and his colleague advocate another kind ofdiscourse analysis: positive discourse analysis to build a positive perspective to analyze the discourse. As thePositive Discourse Analysis is a new theory, a lot of researches are still limited to the theoretical knowledge.Even if some researchers compare the positive discourse of reports, the range of reports is confined to politicaland economic aspects and the number of reports is limited to two reports, which can’t reveal the hidden ideologyin different country. Therefore, this thesis tries to do the contrastive analysis of Positive Discourses of20reportsfrom New York Times and China Daily about London Olympic Games in order to open a new situation for thedevelopment of positive discourse analysis.This thesis adopts Fairclough’s “three-dimensional” model of discourse analysis as its main framework.However, it is just an abstract frame and should be developed within the broad field of SFL. As for the basicanalytical tool, the thesis employs Martin’s Appraisal theory which also developed from the Interpersonalmetafunction in Halliday’s functional grammar, as it can supply a systemic theoretical analytical framework forexploring the language user’s attitude combined with the investigating the textual choices in the light of differentkinds of cultural context and foreign policies in which texts are produced.Through the positive discourse analysis of20reports about the London Olympic, this thesis draws thesimilarities and differences in China Daily and New York Times.First comes to the similarities:both China Dailyand New York Time hold positive attitude toward London Olympic. At the same time these two newspapers obeythe basic rule of news reporting: be objective. Then goes to the differences: New York Times highlights thepersonality and behavior of people more than China Daily while the later focus more on the affect than theformer through the study of attitude comparison. This difference resulted from diverse religion and thinkingmodel. Secondly, the analysis in engagement comparison and graduation comparison draw the same conclusion:because of the different foreign policy, the Chinese advocate harmony while the American advocate Isolationismand Expansionism, that’s why China Daily is more likely to accept the opinion of the others than New YorkTimes.The thesis is composed of six chapters. The first chapter includes research background, purpose,significance and the organization of this thesis. The purpose of this thesis is in threefold. First, find an applicable and effective method for the contrastive analysis of positive discourse for abundance news reports. Second,discover similarities and differences between China Daily and New York Times through positive discourseanalysis. Third, explain the reasons of these differences. Chapter Two is the literature review. Chapter Threeconstructs a theoretical model for PDA by using the Fakclough’s three-dimensional model. Chapter Four givesout a detailed research design including the research question, research methodologies, data collection,instruments and research procedure. Chapter Five lay out the detailed analysis respectively under the threesub-systems in Appraisal theory: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation systems by the combination of thequantitative and the qualitative methods. Firstly,86reports are collected from the website of China Daily andNew York Times, and then20reports are selected for the further qualitative analysis. After the analysis of the dataand examples, this chapter illustrated the different religion, thinking model and foreign policy hidden in twonewspapers. Chapter Six is concluding remarks by summarizing the findings of the present study and pointingout the limitations of the study, on the basis of conclusion achieved already and limitations pointed out, somesuggestions for the future research are also given in that chapter with a hope for a more prosperous prospect ofPDA research in China.In a word, under the guidance of a set of simple and practical positive discourse analysis method, throughthe analysis and studies of20news reports in New York Times and China Daily, this thesis enlarged the scope ofpositive discourse analysis, so as to present a useful supplement to the positive discourse analysis.