Comparative Analysis Of Reports On "North Korean Defectors" From Chinese And American Media: A Cognitive Linguistics Perspective Of CDA

As the two rapid developing schools of today’s linguistics, both cognitivelinguistics and critical discourse analysis came into being in1970s, and graduallydeveloped into the quite influential research paradigm. The term ‘Critical DiscourseAnalysis’(CDA) refers to a particular branch of applied linguistics and associatedwith researchers such as Fowler (1979), Fairclough (1989), van Dijk (1990) andWodak (1996). CDA studies the way in which ideology, identity and inequality arerepresented through texts produced in social context. Due to our limited experience,most of our cognition about certain social and political realities are formed and canbecome social only through discourse, rather than the direct perception andinteraction.Traditionally, the theoretical foundation of CDA is Hallidayan “systemicfunctional grammar”(1985), which mainly concerns about the function of language insocial structure, but ignores the subjective cognition of language using. The mainpurpose of CDA research is to reveal how words and sentences represent ideologicaldiscursive practices, while cognitive linguistics mainly studies how words andsentences express our ideas and thoughts through conceptual metaphor, mental spaceand conceptual blending theory. CDA and cognitive linguistics are consistent at thispoint. And cognitive linguistics is itself a kind of language analysis framework, thus itcan provide a new research framework for CDA, for identifying and analyzing thelinguistic and psychological manipulation strategies in discourse.The main research objects of CDA are public discourses. Within CDA,language is no longer a transmission media which is objective and transparent, as it isalleged by other linguistic schools, but an intervening force in social processes. Inother words, the use of discourse is with some particular purpose. There are certainstrategies in CDA which can be used to realize these purposes especially in politicaldiscourse. Both of the two strategies mentioned in the very thesis can be achievedthrough the use of metaphor, which has been largely neglected in mainstream CDA. Thus，the author integrate CDA and metaphor to enhance the systematicness of thisstudy.Using the new analytical framework, the author selects reports on “NorthKorean defectors” from both Chinese and American media and analyses themcritically. The analysis of the samples reveals that dominant ideologies do embed inboth Chinese and American reports. Even the reports are for the same one issue, dueto the different positions of the two countries, completely different cognition andattitudes reflected.