| In the1980s, as a new discourse analysis discipline, critical discourse analysis appearedin England initially. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has the same meaning with anotherlinguistic term critical linguistics (CL). They are two linguistic terms in the field of CDA. Asa new branch of linguistics, critical discourse analysis focuses on social practice. On the levelof discourse analysis, CDA emphasized on two aspects, one is to study the structural featuresof language; the other is to analyze the hidden ideology. The final aim is to expose the hiddenideology which embedded in language and explore the relationship between language, powerand ideology. Since its birth, CDA attracted more attention from many western linguists. Itcan be used to analyze all kinds of discourses, especially the public discourse, which hasbecome the main analytic target of CDA, for example, news reports, political speeches andofficial legal documents. News reports served as the most significant way for offeringinformation; moreover, it can affect human being’s attitude and value. CDA can reveal theeffects of ideology which embedded in language by analyzing political news reports.The data were collected from two official websites: The Washington Post and ChinaDaily. Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s three meta-functions inSFG, this thesis conducts a detailed contrastive analysis of these ten news reports. Bothqualitative and quantitative approaches are adopted to analyze the data which were collectedfrom The Washington Post and China Daily respectively. In order to achieve the differencesand similarities between these two mass media, the paper makes great attempts to analyze theevent which relates to China’s announcement of the establishment of an ADIZ which locatedover East China Sea. Fairclough proposed that discourse is the product of social practice andit can have the essential influences on the production, distribution and consumption of the discourse to a considerable degree. Fairclough’s three-dimensional model consists ofdescription, interpretation and explanation. At the stage of description, the present researchadopts three analytic tools to investigate the structural features of discourse, as for the lexicalclassification, The Washington Post tends to choose lexis which has the invasion features;while China Daily chooses these words which have no relation with invasion, justself-defense. At the second interpretative stage, this thesis focuses on news sources and newsreporting modes. With regard to the news sources, China Daily employed many directspeeches which come from Chinese authoritative researchers, thus it strengthen the objectivityand fairness of these five news reports, while The Washington Post tends to use many indirectspeeches, its purpose is obvious that The Washington Post wants to lead the reader to theeffects of this event, rather than the event itself. Thus it weakened the objectivity of thesenews reports. At the explanative stage, the present research explores the hidden ideology fromthe institutional, social and cultural contexts.Based on the detailed analysis, we can infer that there exist great differences betweenthese two mass media. The nature of news reports is objective and impartial. News reportalways makes readers feel disappointed. The Washington Post constructs a negative andaggressive image of China to the readers, while China Daily constructs a positive,peace-loving and responsible image of China. This thesis aims to help the readers improvetheir language awareness by analyzing news reports. To enlighten readers to develop theircritical reading ability is the most crucial significance of this thesis. |
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