| Since the establishment of trade relations between China and the United States,the issue of trade frictions has always followed closely.On March 8,2018,U.S.President Donald Trump signed an order imposing sweeping tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum.On the 23 rd of the same month,the Ministry of Commerce issued a list of suspended concessions for U.S.imports of steel and aluminum products and sought public comment on the proposal to impose tariffs on some U.S.imports to balance the damage to China’s interests caused by US tariffs on imported steel and aluminum products.Since then,a trade war has broken out between China and the United States over tariffs.The purpose of this thesis is to make a comparative analysis of the selected news reports about the Sino-US trade war between the mainstream media of China and the United States from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional theory of critical discourse analysis,20 articles from China Daily and 20 articles from CNN are selected.The writer analyzed the selected corpus qualitatively and quantitatively.In the description stage,this study makes a comparative analysis of the lexical choice,transitivity and coherence.In the interpretation stage,it will mainly focus on the discourse speech,including the source of information and the choice of the form of reporting.In the explanation step,the analyze of social practice is divided into three aspects: politics,economy and culture.Through the analysis of news samples collected by the above language tools,this paper finds that,in the description stage,both China and the United States use over-lexicalization and contrastive cohesion,and in the transitivity analysis they both used more material processes and the language process than other process.In the explanation stage,the Chinese media uses more indirect speech,and the news information source mostly is the official spokesman,but the American media uses direct speech more often,the news information source is more diverse.In addition,the United States adopts de-contextualization and re-contextualization to process the quotations.In the explanatory step,the study finds that the different language strategies of the two media are based on different economic,political and cultural considerations.Through the use of language strategies,the Chinese media have actively adopted news discourse to pave the way for the settlement of trade disputes between China and the United States,shaping China’s positive and confident attitude towards solving the Sino-Us trade war problem,and construct the image of a confident,decisive and responsible great power for China.By contrast,the US media has portrayed itself as a great power and China as a threatening opponent,and has tried to point the finger of blame in the Sino-Us trade dispute towards China,in an attempt to suggest that China should follow the US arrangements.The implications of this study are threefold.First,Sino-Us trade war is an hot issue,and this study enriches the application of CDA in the study of news discourse.Secondly,this paper gives some suggestions on how to carry out international propaganda effectively.Thirdly,discourse and news media are the tools of ideology.This article reminds readers to cultivate critical thinking and explore the truth of practice objectively when they receive news media information. |
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