A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Economic News Reports On China And America In New York Times

Critical discourse analysis, which is related to the method of linguistic analysis, was first proposed by Fowler in 1970 s. The aim of critical analysis is to analyze the discourse features and the social and cultural background of the discourse to reveal the ideology hidden in the discourse and the influence ideology has on discourses. In general, the subject discourses of critical discourse analysis are various. But news discourses especially those with obvious ideology such as political news, military news are always the focus of critical discourse analysis. Little attention is paid to the seemingly neutral economic news discourses because the reporters for economic news always claim that their news reports are always fair and objective. However, through reading, we find that various factors such as personal preferences and political inclinations have played a profound role inevitably not only in political news but also economic news.Therefore, the thesis will choose the 20 economic news discourses about China and America in the same period from New York Times and conduct a through critical analysis on them. The author will use Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and three-dimensional model proposed by Fairclough as the theoretical framework. Besides, the author will also combine the qualitative with quantitative method to analyze the resources from the three levels, the textual level, the discursive level and the social practice level. In the textual level, the author will mainly employ the analytic tools of lexical classification and transitivity to find out the linguistic features of economic news reports. In the discursive level, the author will discuss the reporters’ attitudes and judgments from the perspective of modality. In the last level, the author will discuss the social influence on economic news reports and the hidden ideology in the news reports. By doing the above, the author tries to answer the following research questions: What kinds of image of China and America did the New York Times shape in the economic news reports respectively? How did the reporters hide the ideology in the news reports by means of language use?Based on the research, we could find out that due to the New York Times’ ideology, the reports on China and America displayed great difference in lexical choices, including the title for similar events, the verbs to describe similar actions. The reports also differed in the choices of process types of transitivity. The difference in speech reporting modes and speech reporting verbs also shows the influence ideology could have on the use of language. The research finds out that economic news reports are just like the political news reports which are embodied with ideology and are far away from objective as people used to believe. When New York Times covered the similar economic events in China and America in the same period, it delivered a positive meaning in America’s reports, negative in China’s.The value and significance of this research are represented in the following two aspects. The first is the theoretical significance. By conducting the critical discourse analysis on economic discourses, this research extended the applying range of the critical analysis and further proved that Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar are feasible and could be integrated in critical discourse analysis. The second is the practice value. The thesis proved that news reports are not as objective as they claim to be. They are influenced by ideology or politic groups. So the readers would be negatively influenced if they accept the reports without any critical thinking. The thesis might also help readers and English learners cultivate their critical awareness in news reading.