A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On China’s First Lady In American Mainstream Newspapers

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), or Critical Linguistics, is a linguistic theory born in the late 1970s. Through the critical analysis of linguistic features of the discourses, as well as their socio-cultural context in which discourses are produced, Critical Discourse Analysis aims to unveil the ideologies and power relations hidden behind discourses.This thesis takes altogether nine reports on China’s First Lady Peng Liyuan from The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times as data. It aims to unveil the hidden ideology behind personage features, verify the applicability of Fairclough’s Three-dimensional mode and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and certain linguistic tools in the critical analysis of personage features, and explore the differences of the choices of linguistic tools between news reports of different themes. Fairclough’s Three-dimensional mode is taken as the theoretical framework while Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar is the analytic tool. The data is processed from three perspectives including text, discoursal practice and social practice according to the three stages of critical discourse analysis, namely description, interpretation and explanation. At the level of text, lexicalization and passivization of the transformation system are taken as a major analytic tool to conduct the analysis of linguistic features of the nine samples. At the level of discoursal practice, reporting speech is taken as the analytic tool to analyze the intertextuality of the news discourses and therefore interpret the process how news discourses are produced. At the level of social practice, social context is added to the analysis of media discourses and thus the social analysis is carried out, which aims at the disclosure of ideologies and power relations hidden behind the news discourses.Through the analysis and study of the data, the conclusion of this thesis is drawn as follows:there are always certain ideological inclination and power relations hidden behind the news discourses of personage features, just like other news reports do; the applicability of Fairclough’s Three-dimensional mode and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar and certain linguistic tools in the critical analysis of personage features is verified; differences exist in the choices of linguistic tools in the critical analysis of news reports of different themes. Besides, it is also pointed that reports from The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times take advantage of different linguistic tools to embed their bias towards China into the news reports and finally achieve their goal of manipulating the opinions and thoughts of the readers, which helps to raises readers’ critical awareness and critical reading ability.