Critical Discourse Analysis,which was originally proposed by Roger Fowler in the late 1970 s as Critical Linguistics,is a branch of discourse analysis which focuses on social problems and especially on the role discourse plays in the production and reproduction of power abuse or domination in society,aiming at unveiling the relationships between language,power and ideology.News discourse,as an important means of transmitting information,is a key channel for people getting to know what’s happening around the world.Though news reports are claimed to be objective and neutral,it is unavoidable that news reporters’ personal attitudes and stances are loaded in the news reports and passed on to the readers.Readers who are not aware of the fact may be easily influenced by reporters’ ideology.After reviewing previous studies on CDA,it is found that traditional CDA mainly takes a qualitative research method to explain the relationship between linguistic features and the broader social context of a single text or text fragments.The objectivity and representativeness of this kind of research method is questioned by some critics.In addition,most of the previous CDA studies are focused on news discourses about political issues,racial discrimination,gender inequality etc,while news discourse about economic issue,which seems to be more neutral and objective,is paid much less attention to by critical analysts.Therefore,this thesis will take economic news discourse as its study object,combining the qualitative study of CDA with the quantitative study of corpus linguistics to find out whether economic news reports are as objective as they claimed to be.The recent most heatedly reported and discussed economic issue about China is that of renminbi’s entry into the SDR currency basket on October 1st,2016,which has received extensive coverage in American newspapers.This thesis collects 28 pieces of news reports on the topic of renminbi’s entry into the special drawing rights(SDR)currency basket from four of America’s key mass media.A combination of qualitative and quantitative research method will be adopted to analyze certain linguistic and intertextual features of the selected news discourses by using Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar with the facilitate of corpus-based tool AntConc.The study is carried out at three stages: description,interpretation and explanation.At the description stage,linguistic tools based on Halliday’s SFG like transitivity,lexical classification and nominalization will be used to study the textual features of the collected discourses and how they are employed to hide ideology.At the interpretation stage,intertextuality put forward by Fairclough will be employed to analyze source and modes of discourse representations and their hidden ideology.At the final stage of explanation,social factors such as economics,politics,culture will be analyzed to find possible explanations for reporters’ hidden ideologies.Through the analysis,it is found that even economic news reports are not completely value-free.They are usually related to political issues and can also be tactically used by reporters to convey ideologies of the powered group.American mass media’s prejudiced attitudes towards China’s economy are implicitly encoded in the news discourse through various linguistic tactics.Their prejudiced attitudes towards China are not of no reason but are influenced and shaped by the social context in which they are produced.The findings of this thesis imply that even economic news reports are not as neutral and objective as they claim to be,which remind readers to keep a critical eye while reading economic news reports and not to be easily taken in by reporters’ ideology. |