| Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a theoretical framework for discourse analysis which was born in the late1970s. Taking Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as the main theoretical and methodological basis, which was the most influential functional theory of that time, CDA aims to uncover the ideologies hidden behind the discourse, power relations and the relationship between language and ideology by analyzing linguistic forms. It is concerned about the interactions between ideology and discourse, i.e. how ideology affects the structure and function of discourse, and in return how discourse reacts to ideology and how they are born from social practice and power relations, and serve society. Unconsciously accepted by target readers, the latent ideologies lying behind the tangible discourse can affect reader’s cognition in a direct or indirect way and thus can further contribute to shaping their attitudes and values. CDA mainly takes as research subjects public discourses from TV, broadcast, newspapers, websites, official documents and so forth, i.e. discourses that are targeted at the general public, including news reports, advertisements and notifications. Political news, which is laden with ideologies of the ruling class, is particularly in the limelight for CDA researchers. Through the parsing of political discourse, the way the governing classes utilize language to control or to influence the mindset of audiences for the purpose of protecting their own interests and of maintaining the existing social systems will be exposed to the audiences.From the perspective of CDA, language is a form of social practice, and CDA attaches much weight to language use in certain contexts. CDA can be approached in two ways:one can be achieved on linguistic levels:lexicon, grammar and textual structure, inclusively. The other one can be conducted from the perspective of functions based on Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar. On the basis of Fairclough’s Threes-dimensional Model and Thompson’s "methodological framework of depth henneneutics". in addition to Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar, the author boldly proposes a new analytical model of CDA and applies this model in a comparative study of the news reports concerning Diaoyu Island incidents from two representative news media in China and in the U.S., namely. China Daily and New York Times. Twenty news reports are collected and examined to help the author identify the major difference in discourse representations as well as in underlying ideologies between these two different news media. By writing this thesis, the author seeks to:1. demonstrate the value of CDA in the analysis of news discourses;2. probe into the hidden ideologies in news discourses and their influences on readers;3. help raise reader’s awareness of looking on problems in a critical way.This thesis mainly comprises of six parts:Chapter1gives a brief introduction to news media and news discourse as well as the significance of critical study of news reports.Chapter2gives a brief review of the history of CDA and some pioneer practitioners as well as their studies on CDA.In Chapter3, a new analytical model is proposed by the author which is based on Thompson’s methodological framework of depth hermeneutics, Fowler’s classical research model and Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistics.Chapter4gives an overall picture of the research design, with research questions, research procedures and data collection.Chapter5is devoted to a comparative analysis of collected news data from China Daily and The New York Times by using the analytical model proposed in Chapter3in order to reveal the different ideologies hidden in these two different newspapers.Chapter6concludes the results and major findings of the comparative analysis. Besides, contributions and implications of the study are illuminated, and limitations and possibility of further research are also pointed out. |
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