Examining News Media Stance On "Occupy Central" Event:a Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

According to Fairclough, during the creation of a text, language use is always simultaneously constitutive of social identities, social relations and systems of knowledge and belief. As news texts are open to dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings, the study of different news media stances towards a same event would be meaningful. Critical Discourse Analysis is frequently adopted for this purpose; however, it often encounters criticism due to the subjectivity in interpretation and conclusion. An effective step towards countering such concerns would be the utilization of Corpus Linguistics. Therefore, the thesis examines the news discourse collected from China Daily and CNN on "Occupy Central" as corpus data so as to explore the different news media stances, as well as the reasons.In order to build the two micro-corpora News Corpus from China Daily (NCCD) and News Corpus from CNN (NCCN), the author manually picked the news reports concerning the specific event from China Daily and CNN. The paper works under the framework of Three-dimensional CDA on three levels. To begin with, AntConc was used for keyword identification. Then, from the discursive practice the researcher tried to unveil the discourse production and consumption. Finally the different journalistic orientations from the socio-cultural perspective were examined.The study comes to a tentative finding that from the textual level, the standpoint of China Daily is ethical or moral, while CNN provocative; from the discursive practice, China Daily tries to establish the image of a considerate HK government, while CNN shows more concerns for the movement itself; based on the previous studies, China Daily reveals its core stance of maintaining political stability, while CNN depicts China as a dictator to evoke stronger opposition from the young students.