Critical Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And American Environment News Reports

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA)is employed as a multidimensional approach to discourse analysis.Modern critical discourse analysis requires the multi-knowledge and multi-field crossed research.Aiming to analyze the discourse features contained in discourse and a reveal the relationship between the language,ideology and power.Recently,political discourse and news discourse have become a focus in critical discourse analytic research.The present study adopts quantitative and qualitative techniques as a comprehensive method based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as the theoretical foundation.The thesis makes a comparative analysis to the related news report of 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference from China and America,trying to reveal the different language strategies of the related news reports from these two mainstream media,and to explore the ideology hidden in the discourse,and the manipulation towards the ideology of readers.The samples were selected from the mainstream media in China and America,China Daily and The New York Times,the author selects randomly in total 14 sections of reports from the 67 related reports,7 from China Daily and 7 from The New York Times.From the main three meta-functions of Halliday's Systemic Function Grammar,the ideational meta-function,the interpersonal meta-function,and the textual meta-function.The thesis makes a comparative analysis towards the titles and the texts of the news report respectively.In the ideational meta-function perspective,aspects of lexical choices and transitivity are mainly focused;in the interpersonal meta-function perspective,modality system and mood system are examined;in the textual meta-function perspective,conduct a deep discussion in intertextuality and thematic choice,are conducted so as to reveal the diverse ideologies that are embedded in Chinese and American news discourse on climate change.The present study concludes that the Chinese and American news media have employed different discursive strategies to construct and interpret their respective stances and ideologies.The differences in their adopted linguistic devices are summarized as follows: 1)As for the choice of vocabulary,theme,and news source,the Chinese and American news media have a different focus.China Daily stresses the attitude and further solution to the issue of climate change,that is,to actively devotes itself in the climate change combat,such as in carbon emission reduction,which fully reflects that China values and supports this climate change conference with a positive attitude;while The New York Times has given much attention to describing the processes and the speech in the conference objectively and directly,and conflicting the practical opinions of political parties and vested interest groups on this issue,instead of real solutions.2)In the linguistic structure of the modality system and the intertextual system,the two media adopts different language strategies,which clarified the different positions and stances towards the issue of global climate change.China Daily repeats that on the issue of climate change with an optimistic attitude,and believe that it will be improved and alleviated through sustainable management,maintenance,renovation,and emphasizes the coordination and cooperation among countries,showing China has the courage to undertake the mission and responsibility of climate governance as “biggest emission”.While The New York Times emphasizes the damaging situation of climate change with a negative attitude,even questions the effectiveness of this conference,The New York Times focuses more on material processes of transitivity system in ideational function to construct and reports on the series of events.The research objectives and significance of the present study mainly reside in two aspects.First,news reports on 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference from China and America are analyzed via a comparative CDA approach,which has broadened and enriched the research area of Critical Discourse Analysis,and confirmed the effectiveness of the CDA analysis approach in news reports.On the other hand,the critical approach adopted in the present study will hopefully help readers enhance their awareness of critical thinking in reading news reports.