A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News On Alibaba’s IPO In China Daily And The New York Times

Critical discourse analysis studies the textual meaning by combining the language features of discourse with its cultural and social background to reveal the author’s attitude and implicit ideology in the discourse. News discourse appears to be objective, but it is not fair because it is influenced by the author’s attitude, consciousness and the social background. so news discourse does not always presents news events objectively.Six pieces of news on Alibaba’s IPO are selected from China Daily and The New York Times respectively to make a contrast analysis. By applying Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional model and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as the theoretical basis, this thesis studies the attitudes and viewpoints of China Daily and The New York Times on the event of Alibaba’s IPO. According to Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional model, the author makes an analysis of the news reports from the levels of description, interpretation and explanation respectively. On the description level, the language characteristics of the news reports in the two news agencies are studied from the aspects of transitivity system and lexical choice. On the interpretation level, the differences between China Daily and The New York Times in using direct speech and indirect speech and modal words are studied from the aspect of modal system. On the level of explanation, the news reports are studied from the aspects of the social context, political context, and economic context, and the causes which lead to the differences of the implicit attitudes and ideologies are explained.In this thesis, the findings can be concluded as follows: First of all. On the description level, more supportive and praiseful words are used to describe Alibaba public events in China Daily, while in the New York times,more antagonistic and derogatory words are applied in the reports. Secondly, on the interpretation level, more direct speeches are applied in China Daily, while the reporters of the New York times uses a lot of indirect speeches. this difference shows that Alibaba events are reported more objectively in China Daily. Thirdly, on the description level, the news discourses in China Daily reflect the the news reporters’ confidence in Chinese companies and China’s economy. However, the New York times reporters do not trust Chinese enterprises and worry about that China’s economic development will pose a threat to the U.S. economy. Finally, there are completely different attitudes between the two news agencies in applying the transitivity system, lexical system, and the modal system in reporting Alibaba’s IPO. China Daily shows its supportive and optimistic attitude to Alibaba’s IPO,while the New York times holds skeptical and opposed attitude.