| For today's international economic globalization, hot issues concerned with environment of each country have increasingly been active on mass media, especially in world's mainstream media discourse. Environmental problems of China have not been going well, particularly the decline of air quality and severity of smog in recent years. The news reports about pollution incidents, governance and policy have become one of the most attractive parts of news, which also receive much attention from American mainstream media. Discourse scholars have gradually focused on relevant environmental discourse studies. On February 28, 2015, the release of Chai Jing's smog documentary Under the Dome on the Internet drew extensive attention and coverage from domestic and overseas media. This research aims at discussing how Chinese and American media construct the discourse, and explaining discourse matters and discourse strategies with specific social cultural background. It is of great importance in comprehending environmental discourse focus, discourse strategies and the underlying social cultural factors that affect environmental status in these two countries' mainstream media, rethinking the way Chinese media reacts to this event with discourse construction, discourse attitude and discourse strategies, and eventually proposing the advice for improving environmental news discourse and constructing Chinese environmental discourse. In addition, through integrating macro research method with micro one, the discourse contrast study gets enriched, the practical meaning of which is to help readers improve their independent thinking ability and judgement to environmental discourse.This thesis adopts Shi Xu's Cultural Approach to Discourse as the main theoretical framework. But on account of the fact that CAD lays more emphasis on the settlement of discourse matters from the macro level, Martin's Appraisal Theory is also employed to assist investigating different discourse strategies from the micro level. The linguistic analytical tool is Appraisal System and linguistic analysis soft wares are AntConc and BFSU Qualitative Coder. Based on the research angles, this study takes a combinative research method of discourse contrast analysis and specific discourse analysis. The corpus data are selected from Chinese and American mainstream newspaper websites. As the research result shows, the similarities of Chinese and American media lie in that both of them give affirmative comments on Chai Jing and her documentary as a whole, and follow the objectivity principle of coverage. The differences are as follows. First, in the media discourse about Chai's smog documentary, Chinese media quotes large quantity of discourse from official government, media journalists, experts and scholars. American media focuses not only on Chinese official discourse, but also on discourse of Non-Governmental Organization. Second, compared with American media, Chinese media is relatively unitary on constructing discourse theme. Third, on the relations of history and culture, American media pays more attention to introducing native historical and cultural events to cause readers' resonance and thinking. This discrepancy is mainly because the maturity of two countries' environmental news mechanism is different, and they hold different macro understanding towards this event. Fourth, through the further study, the affective items that indicate the emotion of people in Chinese media are more than that in American media, while the items represented judgments and appreciations focusing on the evaluations for people in terms of social behavior and moral qualities in American media are more than those in Chinese media. For the contrast of engagement, Chinese media employs less contract items and more expand items than American media in all, which means that Chinese media provides more dialogical spaces and tries harder for readers' acknowledgement. For the final contrast of graduation items, Chinese media utilizes more raising items and less lowering items than the defined items in American media. Besides, both the sharpening items and softening items in Chinese media are slightly less than the ones in American media. Therefore, American media maximizes the value and persuades readers to support them.By concluding the features of discourse matters and discourse strategies in Chinese and American media discourse about this event, this thesis finds out the social cultural factors that influence environmental news discourse, puts forward suggestions for optimizing environmental discourse reports, brings enlightenment for Chinese environmental discourse construction, and provides case analysis for environmental discourse study to develop in an interdisciplinary and multi-angle research direction. |
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