| The Sino-US trade dispute broke out in March 2018,and the phase-one economic and trade agreement was signed in January 2020.During this period,trade relations between China and US have been volatile,and thus there were lots of news reports focusing on the dispute.As a research direction of Critical Cognitive Discourse Studies,the thesis integrates epistemic stance into Deictic Space Theory.A total of 96 news reports from 1st March,2018 to 20th January,2020 were selected from China Daily and Fox News to build two small corpora.There are two aims of this research.One is to reveal stance of China Daily and Fox News by studying epistemic stance of these 96 news reports.The other is to explore discursive strategies and hidden ideologies by building deictic space models and the discourse system.There are three major findings:(1) The distribution of epistemic stance is different in China Daily and Fox News.China Daily attaches great importance to quoting discourse form executive branch and experts to stand for China while Fox News focuses on quoting discourse from Trump and his administration.It reflects that Fox News represents the Trump administration's stance.(2) China and the United States also show different stance on the Sino-US trade dispute.China's attitude on the settlement of trade dispute is positive.It seeks consultation and negotiation to solve the problem under the circumstance of no influence on its own interest and multilateral trading system,which reflects Chinese ideology-emphasizing on win-win cooperation.The US stance is tough,exaggerating China's impact on the US economy,and demanding sanctions against China.It holds a negative attitude towards equal settlement of trade dispute,which reflects its ideology-emphasizing on confrontation.(3) Discursive strategies were studied based on deictic space.It is found that China Daily used fewer referential strategies and intensification strategies than Fox News.In the use of perspectivization strategy,China Daily paid attention to the balance of executive perspective and experts' perspective,while Fox News focused on citing from executive perspective.Moreover,China has repeatedly emphasized its stance and ideology of win-win cooperation in order to achieve the discourse purpose of coercion.The US has continually stressed that China's unfair trade behavior has brought great damage and threat to the US,and thus constructed a negative China image to achieve the discourse purpose of coercion and legitimization.The critical discourse studies on Sino-US trade dispute were mostly based on one theory and the sizes of the corpora are limited.The innovation of this research lies in the combination of epistemic stance and Deictic Space Theory and the establishment of a new theoretical analysis framework,which is used to analyze stance and ideology of the two sides.Finally,a complete discourse system is built. |
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