A Critical Contrastive Analysis Of Discursive Strategies Between Chinese And American News Reports On The South China Sea Arbitration

South China Sea Arbitration has received great attention since it came into being to the present.News reports from media of different countries flood in and influence the readers' perceptions and attitudes regarding the issue.The thesis applies the discursive strategies of Ruth Wodak's Discourse Historical Approach to make a critical analysis of discursive strategies of the relevant news reports on the South China Sea Arbitration in the Washington Post and China Daily.It intends to contrast the differences in the devices of discursive strategies of DHA and explore the causes of the differences in hope of helping readers have a better understanding of related news reports.Discourse Historical Approach generally consists of five strategies,the thesis mainly applies three of them,i.e.the strategy of nomination,the strategy of predication,the strategy of argumentation based on the features of the collected data.The research data are 30 extracts closely-related to the South China Sea Arbitration.The thesis aims to solve the following research questions:1.How are the discursive strategies applied in the news reports of the Washington Post and China Daily on the South China Sea Arbitration?2.What are the differences in the use of discursive strategies applied in the news reports of the Washington Post and China Daily on the South China Sea Arbitration?3.What are the reasons for the differences?After studying,the major findings are: In aspect of the strategy of nomination,China Daily often applies the membership categorization,like the anthroponym,toponymy and indefinitive pronoun;whereas,the Washington Post adopts the metaphor and metonymy.As to the strategy of predication,China Daily usually uses the explicit predicates,like compound adjective and the superlative degree;whereas,the Washington Post applies the stereotypical words with negative traits.Then with respect to the strategy of argumentation,China Daily mainly applies the topos of abuse and the topos of history;whereas the Washington Post often adopts the topos of threat and the topos of culture.Generally,China Daily often applies positive self-presentation and the Washington Post uses negative other-presentation.To sumup,the reasons for the differences are different stances or positions of each other,and respective cultural factors and stereotypical precepts.This paper bears some practical significance.Firstly,the article can cultivate and develop people's critical awareness by helping them better differentiate the real intention and latent ideology of the news reports.Secondly,it can be beneficial to English teaching.The students can improve their reading by acquiring the discursive strategies of Discourse Historical Approach.