Critical Discourse Analysis Of New York Times’ Reports On Diaoyu Islands Event

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA), which derives from a new branch of linguistics and regards language as a social practice, has developed at a rather high speed in these years. It provides a new multi-dimensional framework to analyze the linguistic features in discourse, hence unveiling the ideological meanings and power embedded in the discourse and demonstrating how language is used to covertly interpret the reporter’thoughts.This approach focuses on the analysis of texts, their production and interpretation and their relation to social impulses and structures. In the field of language education, these analyses are useful and practical for improving the readers’critical language awareness.Adopting Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Mode as the analytical procedures and Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar as the theoretical backbone, this thesis has selected4pieces of news reports on Diaoyu Islands territorial dispute from the New York Times, aiming to unveil the actual attitude of American government towards Japanese government and Chinese government, and the hidden ideology behind news discourse. In description stage, the linguistic tool of lexical classification and transitivity in Halliday’s ideational metafunction, mood and modality in interpersonal metafunction, and passivization and nominalization in textual metafunction are applied to show the linguistic characteristics of the reports on Diaoyu Islands Event from the New York Times. Then, social conventions of Diaoyu Islands in the sample news from the New York Times will be analyzed in interpretation stage. At last, the social-political context of the reports on Diaoyu Islands Event reveals the hidden ideologies in explanation stage.News discourse is by no means completely neutral or impartial. It is hardly feasible for any reporters to produce completely value-free news reports, because the reporters themselves are affected by the social contexts to some extent. News discourse is by no means the pure reflections of social realities, and it is of great significance in constructing the social beliefs. Through the detailed analysis of the news reports, the author finds that Chinese government is depicted as a negative image as a undemocratic ruling government while Japanese government is portrayed with a positive image by the mainstream news agency in America, which caters to the ideology in western society. And the author expects to enhance the readers’ linguistic sensitivity and improve their awareness of criticism in news reading in order to help them avoid being misguided and manipulated by propaganda machines.