A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On The Xi-Ma Meeting By Chinese And American Media

Critical Discourse Analysis,which originated from critical linguistics in the late 1970s,is a new method in the field of discourse analysis.It aims at revealing the relationship among discourse,power and ideology.By describing and analyzing the linguistic features of the discourse,Critical Discourse Analysis tries to reveal the ideologies hidden in the discourse with combination of the social and cultural background of the language.News discourse,as an effective approach for information dissemination,has a wide influence on the public,and thus becomes one of the main subjects of critical discourse analysis.This study aims to analyze the news reports of Xi-Ma meeting selected from both China Daily and New York Times and then reveal the power relation and ideologies hidden in the news discourses.This study adopts Halliday's Systemic-functional Grammar as the analysis tool and the Three-dimensional Model put forward by Fairclough as analytical framework to critically analyze 10 news reports in both China Daily and New York Times.At the description stage,lexical choice,transitivity and modality in Systemic-functional Grammar are adopted as analytical tools to describe the linguistic feature of the news reports in both news agencies.At the stage of interpretation,news source and reporting mode are adopted as the analytical tools to interpret the producing process of news reports in both newspapers.At the stage of explanation,by analyzing the economic and political context under which the language is produced,the reasons of ideological differences in both newspapers are explained.The study finds that there are some differences in the attitude and the content of the news reports on Xi-Ma meeting in both newspapers.At the stage of description,as for the lexical choice,China Daily emphasizes the fact that Taiwan and the mainland belong to one China and highlights the significance of the meeting,while New York Times chooses words which imply the relative independence of Taiwan,and understates the significance of Xi-Ma meeting.In terms of transitivity,China Daily and New York Times mainly adopt material process,relational process and verbal process to report the Xi-Ma meeting.China Daily mainly expresses the profound meaning of Xi-Ma meeting and the positive attitude of the cross-Straits people towards the meeting.New York Times associates Xi-Ma meeting with the Taiwan election,and deliberately renders the negative attitude of Taiwanese towards Ma Ying-Jeou and the meeting.As for modal system,China Daily principally expresses the practical significance of the meeting and the commitment and responsibilities of the leaders on the development of the cross-Straits.However,New York Times tends to negate the significance of the meeting.At the stage of interpretation,as for news source,both newspapers tend to quote speech with specific sources to enhance the credibility of both news reports;as for the reporting modes,China Daily and New York Times mainly adopt indirect speech to express their own viewpoints and stances.At the explanation stage,the differences between the news reports from China Daily and New York Times are rooted in economic and political context.The thesis indicates that the ideologies and political stance held by the USA and China are the major reasons for the differences in the two newspapers,which are deeply subject to the social factors,such as China and the USA's attitudes toward the Taiwan issue,and the economic and political relations between China and the USA at present.This thesis conducts a critical analysis on the news reports concerning the Xi-Ma meeting from Chinese and American media to reveal the different stances and ideologies hidden in the two newspapers.By doing so,the author attempts to enhance the readers' critical awareness on the political news discourse.