Legitimation Of News Discourse

Discursive legitimation plays an important role in both Critical Discourse Analysis and Political Linguistics.Previous studies on legitimation mainly focuses on controversial social issues,such as immigration,gender discrimination,war,nuclear weapons,and enterprise merger.However,these studies have not adequately explored the process of constructing legitimation.Only a limited research focuses on the topic of DPRK nuclear issue.Furthermore,previous research mainly focuses on two parties in a conflict,Us and Them,but pays less attention to other parties like middle power.Based on van Leeuwen's(2008)legitimation strategies and van Dijk's(1998,2005)legitimation theory,this thesis aims to explore the use of discursive strategies and the construction of group memberships in the White House press briefings on DPRK nuclear issue.This study used a self-built corpus of the White House press briefings on DPRK nuclear issue,which were released from January 2016 to October 2017.Legitimation strategies and their realizations were annotated in sentences.Using AntConc 3.4.4,all together 241 authorization strategies,117 moral evaluation strategies,123 rationalization strategies,and 18 mythopoesis strategies were extracted.The major findings of the study are as follows.1)Authorization mainly constructs personal and conformity authority.Personal authorization indicates peninsula denuclearization is supported by many authoritative persons,especially presidents and other government officials of Chinese and American governments.Conformity authorization emphasizes that peninsula denuclearization is the collective will of the international community.This study also finds out authorization in news discourse also involves institutional authority and supplements van Leeuwen's(2008)legitimation strategies.Moral evaluation is mainly realized by evaluation,evaluating the DPRK with negative properties.Rationalization is mainly realized by instrumental rationalization to show the White House's noble goal,reasonable means,and satisfied outcome of a denuclearized DPRK.Mythopoesis is realized by cautionary and moral tales,which tells benefits of a denuclearized DPRK and disasters after the DPRK's nuclear proliferation.2)Members in ingroup are constructed by authorization.The positive image of ingroup,negative image of outgroup,and decisive role of middle power are constructed by moral evaluation.Rationalization and Mythopeosis are not used to construct membership of any group.To be more specific,authorization shows the massive members in ingroup including most authoritative persons and most nations.Evaluation presents the good images of ingroup who protects the peace and security of the international community,the evil characteristics of outgroup who destroys the security,and the decisive role of middle power in solving the issue.However,the suspicious America has pushed China away from ingroup to outgroup.Theoretically,this thesis complements van Leeuwen's(2008)legitimation strategies,which can be applied to specific political discourse analysis.Considering van Dijk's legitimation approach focuses on two parties,Us and Them,this thesis proposes ‘a middle power' may exist in political discourse,which is helpful for constructing memberships of more parties.Practically,this study can be applied to news communication.