A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On China’s Aircraft Carrier

Since the birth in1970s, Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth referred to as CDA) has made remarkable achievements (Xin Bin,2008). CDA pays special attention to two non-literary fields:one is public discourse and official discourse, and the other is individual discourse. The former comes from official sources and usually can directly shape social consciousness which will be accepted passively by ordinary people. The latter is from individuals, which is taken for granted by all and the ideology inside is not perceived (Xin Bin,2002). Critical linguists focus their research on the latent ideology hidden in the discourse. Although they took news discourse as CDA corpus, most of their choices are limited to political news and social news. Their researches on military news especially those on aircraft carrier are scarce.The thesis adopts Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as theoretical framework to conduct a comparative analysis of three reports from China Daily, The New York Times and BBC on the first Chinese aircraft carrier’s official commissioning on September25,2012with the analytical tools of transitivity, modality and lexical choice. The thesis has discussed the different language features of the three media and further revealed the ideology hidden behind language.Language is not a neutral medium but a social practice and it is a means of expressing ideology. The research indicates that the three media have significant differences in the stance towards the first Chinese aircraft carrier’s official commissioning. China Daily mainly reported the significance, future development and defense function of the carrier with a positive attitude; while The New York Times and BBC obviously showed prejudice and discrimination with a negative attitude. Therefore, China Daily mainly chose China, Chinese aircraft carrier, Chinese top leaders and Chinese experts as "Actor","Sayer" and "Carrier", however, both The New York Times and BBC included Japan, Vietnam and other military experts, which brought in some factors with obvious bias. In the reporting process, China Daily mainly used commendatory words but The New York Times and BBC employed a large number of derogatory words. Moreover, both of the two media implied their anxiety on China’s military strength development. So China should rapidly advance the high-end technology of aircraft carrier and propagandize the defensive purpose of the carrier internationally and extensively so as to minimize the unnecessary misunderstanding.The significance of this research lies in that it has expanded the application of CDA into military news analysis. Previously, CDA focused mainly on political news and social news with little attention paid to the seemingly neutral military news especially those of aircraft carrier. The research also can improve English language learners and lovers’critical reading ability while helping them to improve language competences.