A Contrastive Analysis Of News Reports On The Occupy Central Movement Of Hong Kong Based On Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Model

Critical Discourse Analysis, also called Critical Linguistics, is one of the branches in the field of discursive text analysis emerged in Britain in the 1970 s. It studies the ideology behind the language structure and the relationship among language, ideology and power by analyzing the language features as well as social and historical backgrounds of discourse. With the rapid development of Critical Discourse Analysis, more and more scholars have applied it to news reports analysis. Although news reports are records of certain news events, they are by no means absolutely objective and impartial. The ideologies of the journalists and social backgrounds of the events are inevitably transmitted to readers through news reports. Therefore, Critical Discourse Analysis is an effective way to explore the hidden ideology in news reports.This thesis chooses ten news reports on the Occupy Central movement issue of Hong Kong from The Guardian and China Daily respectively as the research corpus, employs UAM Corpus as the statistical tool and adopts Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as the theoretical framework to conduct a contrastive critical analysis from text, discursive practice and social practice. At the stage of text analysis, the linguistic features of the two countries’ reports have been described in terms of classification and transitivity. At the stage of discursive practice analysis, the production and understanding of the two countries’ reports have been interpreted with the tools of news source and reporting modes. At the stage of social practice, the explanation has been made from the perspective of institutional context of the two news media and societal context of the Occupy Central movement issue. From the above three stages of analysis, the relationship among language, power and ideology embedded in these news reports could be uncovered.The study has shown that there are some differences in the news reports on the Occupy Central movement issue of Hong Kong in The Guardian and China Daily. In The Guardian, the Occupy Central movement is distorted as a legal and progressive movement which is launched by the innocent and brave Hong Kong citizens spontaneously to oppose the decisions on universal suffrage of Hong Kong Chief Executive election made by the tough and tyrannical central government. While, in China Daily, the Occupy Central movement is regarded as an illegal assembly which is started by the radicals to disrupt the social order of Hong Kong and violate the law of Hong Kong. The two news media’s different attitudes towards the Occupy Central movement issue are determined by the different political and economic systems of the two countries. Therefore, while reading news reports, readers should activate their critical language awareness and improve their critical reading ability, thus a more objective attitude towards the news reports of different countries’ media will be achieved.