A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And American News Reports On China's Belt And Road Initiative From The Perspective Of CDA

The Belt and Road Initiative,which was put forward by president Xi in 2013,has become a buzzword across the globe and attracted considerable attention from both the press and the academic field.The current research collects dozens of news reports on this issue from the Chinese and American mainstream media to make a contrastive study from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.It adopts Fairclough's Three-dimensional Model as its theoretical framework and utilizes some linguistic devices proposed by Halliday's Systemic-functional Grammar to reveal the discursive and hidden ideological differences between the two countries.The thesis will be expounded at three stages: description,interpretation and explanation,serving as a bridge connecting news discourse to social reality.At the first stage,the lexical classification,transitivity,modality and marked theme are analyzed;at the second stage,intertextuality analysis including reporting mode and news source is carried out;at the last stage,the economic,political and cultural contexts within which the news reports are formed are elaborated to explain why different ideologies are embedded in the news discourse.After analyzing the selected news samples through the linguistic devices mentioned above,this thesis has found that China is confident yet modest in promoting this initiative and its news media actively uses news discourses to pave the way for it,although leaving some technical aspects to be desired.In contrast,the US is skeptical of and even hostile towards this Chinese project and the scathing and disapproving remarks manifest themselves in the US newspapers through plenty linguistic devices.In fact,the discursive and ideological differences between the two countries can be explained by economic,political and cultural realities.The significance of this research is threefold.First,it tries to arouse more academic attention to conduct studies on the Belt and Road Initiative from the angle of critical discourse analysis.This not only lends emphasis on the linguistic approach to studies on this issue,but also enriches application of critical discourse analysis to news discourse.Second,the thesis provides domestic media with advice on how to enhance their discursive power.Through better adopting linguistic devices,the domestic newspapers could more efficiently build up a positive image for China and promote the implementation of this grand initiative.Third,because discourse describes a certain version of reality and serves as a vehicle of ideology,this thesis reminds readers that critical thinking is necessary if they intend to see through conflicting accounts and get hold of what is truly going on in reality.