A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Scripts Of Publicity Films Of China Railway High-Speed

China Railway High-speed(CRH)is a business card of “Made-in-China” in the world.The rapid development of China's high speed train technology has indeed dramatically changed the position of China's railway transportation equipment manufacturing enterprises in the international market.In order to capture the international market share and promote the national image of “Made-in-China”,Chinese government and Chinese enterprises resort to all the available ways,including advertisements,documentaries and publicity films.Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA),emerged in the late 1970 s,sees language as a kind of social practice and aims to make the unconscious ideology in the discourse more explicit and study relationships among discourse,power and ideology,through analyzing the discourse under social context.CDA,as a means of discourse analysis,is suitable for the text research of publicity film.This thesis chooses the scripts of two publicity films related to China Railway High-speed as the research object and uses Fairclough's three-dimensional model as the framework of critical discourse analysis,to make a study on the discourses of publicity films from the perspective of description,interpretation and explanation.In the stage of description,this thesis uses Halliday's systemic-functional grammar as the analytic tool to systemically analyze the linguistic features of texts of publicity films from the three meta-functions of language: ideational metafunction,interpersonal metafunction and textual metafunction,which concretely include transitivity,lexical classification,mood,personal pronoun,theme structure and so on.In the stage of interpretation,this thesis interprets the production of the discourses from the three perspectives of the content,participants and role of language.In the stage of explanation,this thesis explains the discourse of publicity films in the social context to explore how the publicity films of China's high speed railway convince the audience and achieve the purpose of promoting.Through the analysis,it can be seen that the use of language in the publicity film is determined and arranged by the producers of the publicity films for the purposes of promotion.In order to achieve different purposes of promotion,the language producer exercises the power of discourse to choose linguistic strategies,which can convey the publicity film producer's ideology to the target audience.The producers of publicity films use the power of language to persuade the public to accept the objects and adopt the identical ideologies exhibited in the publicity films.Therefore,CDA can not only disclose the hidden relationship between language,ideology and power,but also help the audience to arise their critical awareness of understanding unconscious ideologies in the publicity films.