| Ideology study has been a heated topic of discourse analysis for decades.We find that most of the studies share some common ground,to be specific,the research objects of all those studies mainly focus on the political and economic discourses which are obviously ideological;and those studies are merely from the perspective of Conceptual Metaphor or Critical Discourse Analysis.However,with drastic changes of the Chinese environment,both Chinese media and Western media unavoidably convey to the readers of different ideologies on behalf of the interests of their respective government in view of Chinese smog issues.Those hidden ideologies will influence the readers’ attitudes,opinions,and decisions on such an issue.Therefore,a study of environmental discourses is of great significance.In addition,ideology study should also be multi-dimensional because its representation is a dynamic process which cannot be understood at one single point.The study argues that the relationship between discourse and ideology is not only reflected at the lexical level but also at the syntactic level.The main purpose of reporters is to help readers to have a comprehensive and established understanding on Chinese smog issues,and the cognitive function of metaphor promotes it to be known as the most effective way to achieve this goal.Critical Discourse Analysis put forward by Charteris-Black(2014)is applied to integrate Corpus Linguistics,Pragmatics,Cognitive Linguistics,and Critical Discourse Analysis with metaphor studies.However,compared with the cognitive function of metaphor,reporting modes and news sources at the syntactic level are less obvious in disseminating ideologies.Fairclough(1992)proposes a three-dimensional analytical model for discourse analysis,in which discourse practice pays more attention to how the readers understand the discourse.Therefore,the study would like to integrate Critical Discourse Analysis with Critical Metaphor Analysis to investigate the ideologies in reporting Chinese smog issues between Chinese media and Western media.To be specific,the following questions need to be answered:1.Are there any differences between Chinese media and Western media in selecting Reporting Modes,News Sources and Conceptual Metaphors? If yes,what are they?2.What may these differences,if any,reveal about the ideologies of Chinese and Western media?3.What national images of China are represented through those ideologies?In this study,we employ the qualitative and quantitative approach to investigate cognitive factors underlying reporting mode,news source and metaphor use in the environmental news reports.Qualitative analysis aims at illuminating and illustrating how those differences convey hidden ideologies to readers.Quantitative analysis is used to generalize the distribution of the above three aspects.In addition,“smog/haze in China” is chosen as the keyword to search the relevant news reports in the LexisNexis database from January 2013 to May 2016.Finally,a total of 100 English news reports are randomly selected for setting up two corpora: Chinese Media Corpus(CMC,50 pieces of news,17589 words)& Western media Corpus(WMC,50 pieces of news,21869 words).As for CMC,it includes 50 pieces of English news reported by China Daily and Xinhua.Meanwhile,there are 50 pieces of news in WMC which are reported by49 western mainstream media in all such as The Telegraph,The Guardian,The New York Times,and so on.The research findings are summarized as follows:In choosing different types of news sources,both Chinese media and Western media tend to quote the speeches which have specific news sources in order to keep objective.However,except for specific news sources,Western media prefer to quote more speeches which are with unidentified news sources to mislead foreign readers with inaccurate information;In choosing reporting modes,both Chinese media and Western media tend to use more indirect speeches.However,except for using indirect speeches,Western media tend to use more direct speeches than Chinese media do.Therefore,Western media are more objective from this point of view;There are significant differences between Chinese media and Western media in the use of metaphor.Chinese media regard air pollution control as fighting against an enemy while Western media view air pollution control as traveling along a journey.Chinese media tend to use WAR metaphor to illustrate that the Chinese government and the public have faith in winning the war although smog in China is serious.However,Western media tend to use JOURNEY metaphor to indicate that there is a long way for the Chinese government to improve environment.This study enables readers to become aware of the differences and similarities of ideologies which are expressed by different media under different political systems,economic and cultural background,and it also assists readers to stick to their own stance in reading English news reports. |
PDF Full Text Request