A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Chinese Migrant Workers In China Daily

There has been an increase of news reports on migrant workers since 2002 in the leading official English-language newspaper China Daily,which might be implicative of the fact that the issue of migrant workers has possessed political,economic and social significance in the development of China.Although a large quantity of studies on disadvantaged groups like migrant workers have been done,few studies are involved with migrant workers from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis.In order to dig out how the image of migrant workers is constructed in news discourse as well as how they are evaluated and what ideologies are hidden,this paper analyzes news reports on Chinese migrant workers in the leading English-language official newspaper China Daily from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis.To achieve this goal,based on the corpus collected from China Daily,this thesis uses the modality theory in Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and Martin's Appraisal Theory to analyze how China Daily discursively constructs migrant workers in China,particularly,how their identity is constructed and what aspects of ideologies and what kinds of emotion tendencies are hidden in these news discourses.The findings show that(1)the construction of migrant workers' social identity in news discourse is objective.They are in need of assistance,but they have acted as an important role in the economic development of China;(2)the news reporters hold positive evaluation when writing about the group of migrant workers.The author hopes that readers can perceive the hidden attitudes and objectively and rationally treat this group of migrant workers after reading this paper,so that the social status of migrant workers can be gradually improved in the future.