| As the primary means in mass media, news plays an increasingly remarkablerole in modern society. It is not only an effective channel for informationdissemination, but also an important carrier of non-verbal information, includingdiscourse power, social background, political stance, and so on. News conveys theideology of a certain society while presenting the event, so as to influence people’sjudgement, view and attitude. Island dispute events, one of the most influential topicsin news coverage currently, attract extensive media attention all around the world. Therelated news reports at home and abroad are of significant research value.Critical discourse analysis (CDA), as a branch of linguistics, aims atinvestigating the interrelationship among language, power and ideology. It observesthe linguistic characteristics as well as the social factors of discourse in order to revealthe underlying ideology. This new perspective of discourse analysis offers an efficientqualitative analytical method for news research. The quantitative analytical method ofcorpus linguistics, a further supplement for qualitative approach, makes the small-scalecorpus-based news study available.In light of all the above, the great influential island dispute issues (HuangyanIsland dispute and Diaoyu Islands dispute) in recent years are selected as news events,and two corpora are established by collecting the relevant English news reports fromChinese and American mainstream media to carry on a critical discourse analysis. Thisthesis conducts the analysis of news discourse as text, discursive practice and socialpractice with employing Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as framework as wellas combining Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar. In the text and discursivepractice dimensions, the linguistic features of the news reports are examined in termsof lexical choice, modality and thematic choice in an attempt to disclose the concealedideologies. In social practice dimension, the social contexts are explored from theperspective of culture, politics and military, which helps to expose the reasons that account for the ongoing ideologies.This thesis is made up of six chapters. Chapter One clarifies the background,purpose, significance of the research, and sketches the layout of the thesis. ChapterTwo offers the literature review, giving a broad overview on the development andachievements of the relevant studies at home and broad. The framework of this thesisis elaborated in the third chapter. Chapter Four is composed of research questions, datacollection, research instruments and research design. As for Chapter Five, the core partof the thesis, data is systematically analyzed and discussed. Chapter Six serves as theconclusion, summarizing the findings and implications of the research, andexpounding the limitations and suggestions for further study.Significance of the research lies in two aspects: theoretically, it widens theresearch scope of CDA and proves the feasibility of applying corpus linguistics intoCDA; practically, it enhances the readers’ language awareness and appreciation ability,to some extent, it also promotes foreign language teaching and learning. Meanwhile, itis really a good reference for journalists to depict the international images of China. |
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