A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The News Reports On "Occupy Central" Movement In Hong Kong

The “Occupy Central” movement is a series of unlawful assembly protests activities that occurred in central area in HKSAR, which has aroused great echo in society. Therefore, many newspapers both at home and abroad have made reports on it, while The New York Times and China Daily have different reports. In addition, there were many experts studying it from the perspective of critical discourse analysis, which focus on only intertextuality. This study adopts the relatively wider linguistic devices to analyze the relational reports on the “Occupy Central” movement in Hong Kong, which aims to analyze how the hidden ideology is revealed through linguistic devices and provide the implication of the study in political news report.The present study employs the reports of “Occupy Central” movement in Hong Kong as data, which are selected from The New York Times and China Daily in 2014. Each of them has 28 samples respectively(total 44647 words). Besides, under the framework of the Fairclough's three-dimensional model and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar(SFG), the quantitative method is adopted to analyze the self-built data from three perspectives of text level, the discursive practice level and social practice level.The major findings of the study reveal that the linguistic device is an effective language strategy for constructing the hidden ideology in discourse. The linguistic devices of lexical classification, modality, transitivity and intertextuality are expressed differently in The New York Times and China Daily on the “Occupy Central” movement. In conclusion, the reports in The New York Times attempt to beautify the movement, which is impartial, while the reports in China Daily are objective and the reporters strive for clarifying the facts of the movement. Moreover, such different news reports are influenced by economic, political, cultural and historical factors.The study of language devices in this thesis has some implications for political news report. The study of linguistic devices which are used mostly in political news reports in this thesis to express the hidden ideology in the discourse. The features of the political news are freshness, authenticity, effectiveness and politics, but in which the politics are the most essential characteristics. So the reporters tend to control by a certain degree of ideology and cover up the truth. Therefore, the political news coverage must be accurate and the reporter should enhance public awareness to adapt to the needs of readers. Moreover, the political news coverage should be comprehensive, depth and objective, and the reporters should avoid the inherent political stance, which requires reporters have some basic qualities, such as high ideological and political culture, a broad range of cultural knowledge and excellent professional skills and so on.