| As a crucial branch of discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis emerged in the 1970s and soon achieved great development. Adopting analytic tools from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, critical discourse analysis focuses on identifying the relationship among language, power and ideology with an aim to disclose the ideological influence on discourse. News discourses, as one of the most crucial channels for transmitting information, are far from value-free. Therefore, news reports have always been a research interest for scholars in the field of critical discourse analysis. A large number of scholars and researchers have made efforts to conduct discourse analysis of various genres of discourses with obvious ideology such as political discourses, political speeches, military news etc. However, little attention has been paid to air disaster news reports which are seemingly value-free.This study, based on the three-dimensional model of Fairclough, attempts to apply critical discourse analysis to news discourses on air disasters, and mainly analyzes seventeen news reports on air disasters in 2014. The collected news reports, extracted from China Daily and New York Times, are analyzed from four aspects: lexical choice, transitivity, modality and news sources, trying to answer the following two research questions:(1) Are the collected sample reports on air disasters free from ideologies? If not, what are the ideological differences in China Daily and New York Times when reporting the same air disaster and what are the causes of these differences?(2) How do reporters express the hidden ideologies and what kinds of linguistic devices are favored by China Daily and New York Times when reporting the same air disaster?The present study selects altogether seventeen news reports on air disasters in 2014 from China Daily and New York Times as the sample data for analysis. Firstly, lexical choice, transitivity and modality will be explored at the stage of description with a view to illustrate the linguistic features of these reports qualitatively and quantitatively. At the interpretation stage, then, news sources will be discussed to demonstrate the production of news discourses. At last, this study attempts to investigate the reasons about ideological differences, aiming to give a tentative account for the linguistic representations and the embedded ideologies in the collected news reports.After a close examination of the seventeen samples about air disasters, several findings have come to light. Firstly, these seemingly impartial and objective news reports on air disasters are invested with hidden attitudes and ideologies by reporters and they are not really value-free. The ideological differences are determined by many factors, such as institutional context, the influences of air disasters and other social and cultural elements. During the process of news production, reporters mix the hidden ideologies with the news discourses with the help of liguistic devices like lexical choice, transitivity, modality and news sources. Secondly, both reporters from China Daily and New York Times flexibly apply linguistic devices into productions of news reports so that they can ensure the transmitted information is in accordance with the attitudes and stances.This study is significant both in theory and practice. The theoretical significance lies in that it provides a new framework to analyze disaster news discourse and to expand the applyting range of critical discourse analysis. Practically, it is hoped that this study can help to develop readers’ critical awareness when reading news reports. |
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