A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And American News Reports On Leaders' Summit Meeting

Critical discourse analysis(CDA),a method of discourse analysis,regards language as a social practice and discourse as a product of social practice.Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA),mainly developed in the late 1970 s,whose primary purpose is to explore the implicit ideology hidden in public discourse and reveal the relation among language,power and ideology.Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un held several talks with each other in 2018 and 2019,which attracts the attention of the global media.Among these global media,China Daily and the Washington Post are two influential and authoritative Chinese and American newspapers.Therefore,making a contrastive critical analysis of news reports on two leaders' meeting between these two newspapers is worthy and meaningful.In this thesis,the author attempts to answer three questions shown as follows: firstly,what similarities and differences of language concerning transitivity,passive voice,modality and reporting modes may exist in the news reports on leaders' meeting between China Daily and the Washington Post? Secondly,what sociocultural context may influence the representation and realization of the selected news reports? Thirdly,what different ideologies are hidden in the news reports on leaders' meeting between China Daily and the Washington Post?In this thesis,30 pieces of political news reports are selected from the official websites of China Daily and the Washington Post as the research data.Fairclough's three-dimensional framework functions as the theory of this study and Halliday's SFG serves as the analyzing path.The stage of description analyzes the transitivity and passive voice.In the stage of interpretation,the ways of reporters to show the interpersonal function of language by modality and reporting modes are uncovered.The stage of the explanation explores the institutional,societal,situational and political contexts.In the process of analysis,two corpora are constructed,named CDT and WPT and corpus tool AntConc 3.5.7 is employed in the classification of lexical system.It is found that there are some similarities and differences of language existing in the news reports on Sino-North Korean leaders' meeting between China Daily and theWashington Post.It is shown that the material process,passive voice and the modal verbs in medium value are the most frequently employed types in these two newspapers.With respect to differences,the verbal process occupy a large proposition in China Daily.By contrast,reports in the Washington Post witness more mental process and modal verbs in low value.In addition,the sociocultural contexts contribute to the difference in the representation and realization of the selected news reports.Form the contrastive analysis,it is indicated that the implicit ideology is hidden in the new reports on the Xi-Kim meeting.China Daily pays more attention to the attitudes of these two leaders towards some affairs and the positive influence of this meeting.A positive image of this meeting is shown to the readers.By contrast,the reporters in the Washington Post intend to mention other actors rather than the meeting itself with the aim of making the reports more objective.This thesis conducts a contrastive analysis of the leaders' meeting from the perspective of CDA.It is illustrated that the implicit ideology hidden in the new reports on the Xi-Kim meeting exerts a subtle influence or control on the public.Hence,it is necessary to raise people's critical awareness in their reading of news reports.