A Corpus-based Study Of "China's Economic Image" From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

In the international competition of the era of globalization,the promotion of national image as a national strategy has become increasingly prominent.As a result,“national image” has become a hot topic of common concern among different social disciplines,such as international relations,social psychology,journalism and communication,linguistics.Therefore,interdisciplinary is typical of national image study.In recent study of national image by scholars at home and abroad,the research language data mainly consists of the media reports collected manually,and the research methods mainly include the Content Analysis and the Framing Theory in Communication.However,the application of Corpus in the study of China's national image,especially in the study of China's economic image,is very limited and needs to be further enriched.In this study,a miniaturized self-built corpus is built to analyze the overall image of China's economy in the New York Times from 2013 to 2017.This Corpus contains 916 news reports(95,4318 tokens)on China's economy from the New York Times that are downloaded from the database LexisNexis.Based on the Three-Dimensional Model of Fairclough,this study combines the retrieval and collocation functions of Corpus tools to conduct a qualitative and quantitative discourse analysis on the collected news data,so as to discover the discursive strategies of the New York Times in reporting China's economy and its underlying social reasons.The critical discourse analysis in this study is carried out at three levels.At the textual level,the author analyses lexical choice and Halliday's SFG analysis tools of transitivity and modality in these selected news texts;at the discourse practice level,the study adopts Fairclough's analysis tools of intertextuality,such as reporting verbs and news sources;and at the social practice level,based on Donald Nuechterlein's definition of national interest,the study explores the underlying social reasons of text discourse from three perspectives: economic interests,world order interests and ideological interests.The research results show that:(1)At textual level,the choice of adjectives and transitive verbs construct a negative image of China's economy as a whole;in the study of modal auxiliary verbs,it shows that verbs of positive median value account for the largest proportion,which indicates that the tone of reporting Chinese economic image is relatively euphemistic.(2)At discourse practice level,reporting verbs of neutral attitudes account for the largest proportion,but through the observation of specific contexts,it is found that many reporting verbs of neutral attitudes have constructed a negative image of China's economy in the reporting content;the choice of reporting sources also has a strong purposefulness,reflecting the overall attitude tendency of the text.(3)At social practicelevel,this study concludes that the major social reasons behind the selected text discourse are to protect the economic interests,the world order interests and the ideological interests of the United States.Through this study,it can be seen that news discourse is not virtually objective and fair.Therefore,readers should critically identify the intention and ideology conveyed by news reporters in news discourse when reading news reports.And domestic linguists can make use of their linguistic knowledge to reveal the hidden ideological and social reasons in news reporting language,so as to better protect and improve China's national image.