A Corpus-based Study Of The Uses Of Five Government-meaning Words-Administration,Authority,Establishment,Government,Regime-in Time Magazine

This thesis is an analysis of the different expressions of Chinese government in Time magazine from 1951 to 2000 from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.Firstly,administration,authority,government,establishment,regime,five words with government meanings,are investigated in three authoritative dictionaries with their definitions compared and analyzed.Then their real usages including the semantic prosody and collocations are compared through Sketch Engine with British National Corpus.Next,the patterns and distribution of these words in Time magazine corpus are investigated and their usages are furthermore investigated when they are used to refer to Chinese government from 1951 to 2000.Finally,the uses of these words in Time are coincided with the development process of Sino-American relations from the whole course and some typical historic periods,and the relationship between them is elaborated on and summarized.The study shows government is a neutral word,but its different collocates express different emotional colors.Administration is generally used to refer to the American executive center.When used to mean a government,authority is often written in the plural form.It can be used to refer to the central government of a country but more to a certain governmental agency in charge of affairs in a certain area.Establishment isn't often used to mean government and its semantic color is dependent on the discourse context.Regime negatively means an illegal or disapproval government.Therefore,administration and establishment don't show a certain ideology.Authority and government show the reporters'attitude towards a government to some degree.The recognition of the governmental agencies follows the recognition of the government of a country.The Sino-American relations can be divided into three periods:the adversarial period in the 1950s and 1960s,the improvement period in the 1970s,and the fluctuating development period after the establishment of the diplomatic Sino-American relations.The study shows that administration and establishment have an even frequency in fifty years.The frequencies of government and authorities have been increasing quickly after the improvement of the bilateral relations.Although government has a very high proportion in the beginning of the 1950s,most of them are modified by ideological words.Regime has a high frequency during the adversarial period but the frequency decreases dramatically with the improvement of the Sino-American relations.All these changes show that the reports of Chinese government in Time magazine are not objective.Instead,they are based on the change of the bilateral relations and ideologically serve for the American national interest.The significance of the present study lies in the corpus-based critical analysis of media discourse through the words study and revealing the hidden ideology of the reports about Chinese government in Time under the Fairclough's three-dimensional model.By elaboration of the relationship among language,power,and ideology,the ideology implied in the media discourse is exposed to readers to remind readers of enhancing their awareness of critical thinking when reading news reports.Meanwhile,this thesis calls on pressmen to break the shackles of ideology and report the news facts to the largest degree to promote the understanding among people from different cultures and countries.