An Analysis Of The Guardian’s Reports On Lee Bo Event Based On Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Model

This thesis is an analysis of The Guardian’s reports on Lee Bo event.As a Hong Kong book publisher,Lee Bo went to the mainland to assist in an judicial investigation,but because of his British nationality,the British government seized the opportunity to interfere with the event.The thesis is under the framework of critical discourse analysis in the field of linguistics,with the aims to prove the feasibility of news reports as a corpus of critical discourse analysis,to explore the ideology factors hidden in news discourse and its impact on public cognition,and to raise the public’s critical consciousness of news discourse,etc.The thesis tries to answer the following research questions:What are the linguistic features of political news discourse?Is news discourse value-free?If not,how does news discourse reflect social and ideological inclinations?How does news discourse influence and lead readers’ views upon the event,and so on.The methodology and framework the thesis applies is Fairclough’s three-dimensional model.This theory includes three dimensions,namely,description,interpretation and explanation.In the stage of description,Halliday’s systematic-functional grammar is used as the analytic tool to analyze linguistic features quantitatively.The second stage explains the production and representations of discourse by the connection between discourse and social practice.In the final stage of explanation,discourse and social and cultural context.are linked to illustrate the relationship between discourse and ideology.In this paper,the author selects 20 reports from January to March in 2016 as the main research objects of this paper,in which all news reports are about Lee’s event in Hong Kong.The paper consists of five chapters.The first chapter summarizes the research orientation,research rationale,research questions,outline of the paper and an overview of the result and conclusion of the thesis.The second chapter reviews the development of Critical Discourse Analysis,the interpretation of important terms related to research,and the methodology of the research-Fairclough’s three-dimensional model,and one important analytic tool-Halliday’s systematic-functional grammar,and previous studies on news discourse at home and abroad.The third chapter is the collection and collation of textual data.The fourth chapter is the analysis part of the paper,taking the three-dimensional model of Fairclough as the analytic framework.First is the analysis of linguistic features of the text,which mainly applies Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as a concrete analytic tool,to explain the text features and hidden ideological factors from transitivity,modality analysis and lexical classification.The second part is the analysis of the discourse representation,analyzing from the source and modes of news to do further elaboration;finally is the analysis of the social and cultural context and comprehensive discussions upon the analyzing results.The fifth chapter is the conclusion part,which summarizes the main findings,conclusions,limitations and suggestions on future researches.From the analysis of the news discourse,it is concluded that the seemingly fair and objective news reports actually hide ideology tendencies.To be specific,the reports of The Guardian make a negative attitude and position toward China and also make a negative Chinese image.The use of a variety of language strategies and language forms in the news reports of Lee’s event can lead to a guiding and influential role for reader’s attitudes and opinions.The news report is constructed from the society,which owns social significance.Therefore it can be seen that,a critical analysis upon news discourse has practical significance on improving the critical reading consciousness of the public.