Critical Discourse Analysis Of Chinese Economic News Reports In New York Times

This thesis adopts Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and M.A.KHalliday’s functional grammar as the framework to analyze the news samples aboutChina’s economic situation in the New York Times from the perspective of criticaldiscourse analysis in order to reveal the ideological messages embedded in theeconomic news.Critical linguistics is a new branch of modern linguistics. Since the birth ofcritical discourse analysis in1970s, critical linguists have devoted themselves tounveiling the interrelationship between language, ideology and power. Newsdiscourse is a kind of public discourse and receives lots of attention from manylinguists. However, most of the research is related with politics, war and strike.The research questions of this thesis are1) Is the economic news in the New York Times objective and factual?2) How do readers make use of those analytical tools to get the ideologyembedded in the economic news?3)What is the image of China constructed by the New York Times?The news samples in this thesis are from the New York Times in2011and2012.A discourse is considered as communicative event which consists of three parts: text,discursive practice and social practice. The author conducts a detailed analysis aboutfour news samples from these three perspectives. At the textual level, transitivity,modality and classification are adopted at this level. At the discursive level, this thesisanalyzes the modes of representation and news sources. At the level of social analysis,this thesis tries to find the explanation of the embedded ideologies at the textual anddiscursive levels from political, historical and cultural perspectives.This study finds that the news samples of China’s economic situation in theNew York Times are unilateral. The news reporters hold a negative attitude toward theeconomic development in China. And they also stress that weak situation in Chinaleads to the recession in the whole world, and then China should feel responsible for it.They also show their mistrust toward Chinese government. Such unbalanced news reports are influenced by political, historical and cultural factors.This research results have some implications. First, in the field of Englishteaching, the teachers should improve the critical awareness of Chinese students whenthey are studying English. When the students read English news, they shouldacknowledge the ideologies embedded in English news. When they write, they shouldknow how to avoid misunderstanding. Second, the image of Chinese governmentshould be improved. China should increase the communication with the whole world.Especially for those journalists who write the reports about China, they should havemore accesses to learn more about China.