Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On China-related Economy

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA), also referred to as Critical Linguistics or Critical linguistic Research, was an interdisciplinary research established by Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress in the late 1970 s and early 1980 s, aiming at studying and analyzing social linguistic problems and relating to the disciplinary fields of linguistics, sociology, communication and the like. Scholars working in the tradition of CDA generally assume that(non-linguistic) social practice and linguistic practice constitute one another and focus on investigating how societal power relations are established and reinforced through language use. As a reproducible discourse, instead of simply a natural and visible medium, news serves as a reflex which manipulates the social ideology with outward manifestation of languages. Therefore, Critical Discourse Analysis on news is to unveil the ideologies hidden under the linguistic cover of news, to reproduce, interpret and explain the real essence of text and discourse in the pervasive socio-cultural life, to explain how the text and discourse serves the ideologies, and further, to enable readers to get a better comprehension of true intensions and underlying social backgrounds beyond its appearance.In recent years, based on the description of news reports on social events for specific ideologies and the promotion of the news reports on socio-cultural exchange and interpersonal communication, CDA on the news reports has become a hot topic in the field of linguistics. However, scholars have adopted different approaches to study the ideologies of news discourse, among which Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL) of Halliday provides fruitful results for CDA studies. According to Systemic Functional Linguistics, as a tool for human communication, language has the metafunctions of the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function, which determine that text and discourse presented by language users is often influenced by certain social environments and discursive contexts and embodies corresponding social and ideological characters. Based on the theory, CDA often takes the systems of transitivity, classification, modality and transformation as the analytic tools to probe the relationship between ideology and discursive practice.Thus, with Halliday’s SFL as theoretical basis and adopting the analytical framework of CDA, the thesis, focusing on the qualitative method of study, selects 30 China-related economic news reports respectively from The New York Times and The Washington Post in the year of 2014 as discourses to compare and research news discourse in terms of the transitivity system, the classification system, the modality system and the transformation system, which reveals the power relation reflected by the discourses and their ideological processes. The major findings of the research are that, as servers of English-speaking countries, the two mainstream media has achieved certain political, social or cultural purposes through news edition under the control of political power, thus their news reports tend to try to insert influence on ideologies of readers through linguistic skills and finally to achieve required political control. The thesis confirms the feasibility of methods of CDA in news reports and provides a new perspective for CDA studies on news report genres.