A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On The South China Sea Disputes In China Daily And The New York Times

Critical discourse analysis(CDA),as an interdisciplinary approach to discourse analysis,has been widely applied to the analysis of various social discourses,especially public discourses.As a kind of public discourse,news discourse is supposed to be objective;however,they are always subject to reporters' attitudes and ideologies.CDA aims to reveal the ideologies imbedded in the discourse representations and the influence ideologies have on discourses by exploring the linguistic features as well as the wider social-historical context of the discourse.By adopting Fairclough's three-dimensional framework and Halliday's systemic functional grammar as the theoretical framework,the present study intends to conduct a critical discourse analysis of selected news reports on the South China Sea disputes from China Daily and The New York Times.In this thesis,three questions are proposed:(1)Are the news reports on the South China Sea disputes in China Daily and The New York Times objective and value-free? If not,how are they ideologically invested?(2)How do the linguistic devices in selected news discourses reflect the hidden ideologies?(3)How can the different ideologies reflected in the two newspapers be accounted for?The author will conduct the analysis at three levels with a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.At the level of text,the analysis is conducted through lexical classification,transitivity,and modality to examine the linguistic features of selected news discourses.At the level of discursive practice,the study focuses on news sources and reporting modes of the discourse representations to show the production of news discourse.At the level of social practice,by analyzing the wider social context the study attempts to account for the choices of linguistic and discourse representations and further to reveal the ideologies embedded in selected news discourses.Through detailed analysis of selected news discourses,it is found that both China Daily and The New York Times invest ideologies into news reports on the South China Sea disputes.Reporters in the two newspapers invest ideologies into selected news reports through many linguistic devices.In terms of lexical classification,reporters in the two newspapers employ different words and expressions to portray different images of the same country.As for the transitivity system,the selection of process types and its participants all depends on the ideologies of reporters and the power groups they represent.The choice of different modal verbs can also carry reporters' or speakers' judgments and attitudes towards the South China Sea disputes.Moreover,how to quote others' utterances and whose utterances to be selected all depend on the reporter's intentions and ideological orientations.The reasons for the differences in the transmission of ideologies can be explained by the wider social and cultural context.Both newspapers are manipulated to serve the purposes and political stances of their own countries.With these findings,this thesis further proves that news discourses are not absolutely objective and at the same time it is hoped that the present study can make slight contribution to the critical studies of news discourse and to raise readers' critical awareness in news reading so as not to be influenced and misled by the hidden ideologies.