Critical Discourse Analysis From The Perspective Of Intercultural Communication On Main Stream Reports On China’s "V-Day Parade" Of Two Mainstream Newspapers Of China And The US

Based on the theoretical framework of CD A, this thesis aims at revealing differences of linguistic characteristics and ideological implications in news discourse concerning the same reporting subject. News discourse is supposed to be objective and value-free, but it is not so according to the previous researches conducted by famous scholars of CDA such as Fairclough and Wodak, etc. They find that as one of the most important media to pass on information and ideas, news reports are riddled with ideology imposed on the masses by the power holders. Therefore, the author selects 12 news reports from the two mainstream English newspapers of America and China, The Washington Post and China Daily respectively. The 12 samples are all concerned with the commemoration of China’s victory in the World War Ⅱ and a military parade accompanying that.A contrastive analysis of news discourse through three levels is conducted according to Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model with 107 instances illustrated. In the first dimension: discourse as text, Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar is adopted to examine the divergences between headline foregrounding, transitivity, theme and modality. In the second dimension:discourse as discursive practice, the presentation of voices and quotations in the news, as well as the news resources is going to be discussed. In the third dimension:discourse as social practice, the political, economic and social contexts where the news discourse is produced, disseminated, received and interpreted is analyzed comprehensively. Since ideology is pervasive among words and sentences in the discourse, the reflection of ideological implications is woven into the appearance of divergence each time. And the third dimension is no doubt the most important part in that it is aimed at giving the micro differences found in the first two dimensions an explanation from the macroscopic perspective.Through the analysis from three dimensions, the paper reaches the conclusion that news discourses concerning China’s V-Day parade are revolved around two different directions. Discourses of The Washington Post play up China’s military power demonstrated in the parade while those of China Daily try to minimize the presence of military force and advocate peaceful development. The result further reinforces the assumption maintained by CDA scholars that no discourse is spelt without the control of ideology.