A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Reports On President Xi Jinping’s Visit To US

As a new approach to discourse analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis sprang up inthe1980s. It focuses on analyzing the language features in discourse as well asinvestigating social backgrounds of the formation of discourse. It reveals the ideology andpower hidden behind the discourse.Language, as a communicating tool, can reflect the ideology of a certain society.News media seems objective, but it reveals the ideology which influences the readers.Critical Discourse Analysis is an effective method to analyze the news discourse.The thesis aims to investigate the interrelationship among language, power andideology. It chooses the news on president Xi Jinping’s visit to US from the media of fourcountries, such as New York Times, The Yomiuri Shimbun, The Guardian and China Daily,as linguistic corpus and is based on Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar andFairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model. It analyzes the corpus from three levels. At thelevel of texts, the features of the news’ languages from the perspectives of classificationand transitivity are discussed. At the level of discourse practice, the author discusses thenews’ intertextuality from the sources of the news reports and the modes of the newsreports. At the level of social practice, the author analyzes the social culture andbackground of the news reports and reveals the ideology and power relations hiddenbehind them.Through the analysis, we can find that first, different news agencies differ from eachother in both the textual level and the level of discourse practice. These differences can beattributed to their different ideological orientations and political stances. Second, newsdiscourse is far from objective as it claims. News agencies always represent their owncountries’ ideologies as well as the governments’ political stances.As regards to the issue of President Xi Jinping’s visit to US, the linguistic differences of the four countries lie in their different ideologies and power relations. Thereports in New York Times indicate that US values this meeting and wants to cooperatewith China, but there still exist some differences when its own interests are concerned.Japan and US are allies, while China and Japan have a conflict on Diaoyu Islands. So theexpectation of The Yomiuri Shimbun to this meeting is low. The Guardian is relativelyimpartial, but it still favors the US. The reports from China Daily represent the attitude ofChinese government. China pays more attention to this meeting and values the cooperationwith US.The thesis proves the applicability of Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar andFairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model in analyzing news discourse. Furthermore, itreveals the ideologies hidden behind the news and helps readers to improve their criticallanguage awareness.