| Legitimation refers to the process of making explanations and justifications for how things are and how things are done widely acceptable.As a kind of social practice with a discursive nature in essence,legitimation has long been a focus of attention for discourse analysis.Media texts as significant battle fields for legitimation have been involved in many studies.The existing studies mainly focus on media texts' legitimate functions for enterprise actions,but their legitimate functions for government actions have not got enough attention.Besides,existing researches mainly focus on macro discursive strategies,the micro linguistic realizations or linguistic features of legitimation have been neglected.Therefore,this study tries to investigate discursive strategies used in U.S.broadsheets during the U.S.subprime mortgage crisis to legitimize the Federal Reserve's(Fed)bailout policies and the typical linguistic realizations of these legitimation strategies.Drawing from critical discourse analysis and more specifically van Leeuwen's framework of discursive legitimation strategies,and taking The New York Times and The Washington Post as examples,this study investigates discursive legitimation strategies used in news reports about the Fed's bailout policies in U.S.Broadsheets from 1 December,2007 to 31 May,2008.Taking transitivity system and logico-semantic system of systemic functional grammar as analytical tool,the typical linguistic realizations of these strategies are investigated in a systematic way.The results indicate that in news reports about the Fed's bailout policies,news reporters used discursive legitimation strategies of “authorization”,“moral evaluation”,“rationalization” and “mythopoesis”.By making specific choices from language system,news reporters tend to represent the Fed's actions as warranted by authoritative institutions or persons,corresponding to moral norms,conducive to achieve specific goals,being effective and inevitable,in order to legitimize them. |
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