| Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a fairly new theory of discourse analysis. Concerned with ideology, relations of power and inequality in language, Critical Discourse Analysis is employed as a multi-dimensional, multidisciplinary approach to discourse analysis. Recently, news discourse has become a focus in critical discourse analytical research.The present study has adopted Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, building on Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, as the theoretical framework. Corpus Linguistics has provided another approach to the present discourse analysis. Thus, a quantitative and qualitative analysis of data collected from Chinese and American news reports on climate change has been conducted. The quantitative analysis is carried out in the corpus linguistic analytical approach and the qualitative one is carried out in the SFG approach, altogether contributing to the reliability and viability of the present study.The two corpora are built with sampled news reports on climate change dated from November22nd,2013to October22nd,2014from China Daily, Xinhua, and The New York Times. The present analysis is conducted in three stages. In the description stage, aspects of lexical choices, transitivity, modality and theme selection are mainly focused. In the interpretation stage, news sources under intertextuality are examined. Finally, in the explanation stage, the institutional, situational and social context in which texts have been produced and disseminated are investigated, so as to reveal diverse ideologies that are embedded in Chinese and American news discourses on climate change.The present study concludes that the Chinese and American news media have employed different discursive strategies to construct and interpret their respective stances and ideologies. The differences in their adopted linguistic devices are summarized as follows:1) As for the choices of vocabulary, theme, and news source, the Chinese and American news media have different focus. The Chinese news media stress the unanimous voice and stance on the issue of climate change, that is, to actively engage itself in the climate change combat, especially in carbon emission reduction and the Sino-U.S. cooperation. However, the American news media have given much attention to conflicting opinions of political parties and vested interest groups on this issue, instead of real solutions.2) In terms of the system of transitivity, the Chinese news media tend to utilize a higher percentage of verbal processes to make convincing statements by quoting governmental officials while its American counterpart focuses more on material processes to construct and report series of events.The research objectives and significance of the present study mainly reside in two aspects. First of all, news reports on climate change from different countries are analyzed via a corpus-based comparative CDA approach, which has broadened and enriched the research area of Critical Discourse Analysis. Moreover, the critical approach adopted in the present study will hopefully help readers enhance their awareness of critical thinking in reading news reports. |
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