A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Discourse Hegemony In The Reports Of The New York Times On China-US Trade Tensions

Since the official outbreak of the China-US Trade Tensions in March 2018,it has attracted close attention from international media.The New York Times is one of the three major newspapers and magazines in the United States,and has a large coverage on the trade tensions.The American media have always advertised its fairness and transparency,saying that the news reported is “free” and “independent”,that is,it is not subject to interference from government.However,the American news media is controlled by many interest groups,and the ideology of interest groups must be reflected in the report.Therefore,it is unavoidable that news reporters' personal attitudes and stances are loaded in the news reports and passed on to readers.Critical Discourse Analysis is designed to reveal the ideology implied in news discourses.Therefore,this dissertation intends to conduct a Critical Discourse Analysis on34 reports on China-US Trade Tensions in The New York Times with an intention to uncover the discourse hegemony underlying news texts and clarify the relationship between language and power.Based on Fairclough's three-dimensional model and with the facilitate of the corpus tools UAM and Ant Conc,this thesis combines the qualitative study of CDA with the quantitative study of corpus linguistics.On doing the research,it follows the three steps: description of linguistic features in terms of Halliday's transitivity system,Martin's attitudinal resources as well as Leech &Short's reported modes;interpretation of relationship between the hegemonic discourses and ideology;and explanation of the social reasons in a broad context under the hegemony-laden discourse.According to the research results,the following conclusions can be drawn:(1)Some linguistic features of economic news on the China-us Trade Tensions from the perspective of attitudinal resources,transitivity and reporting speech are presented.In terms of transitivity system,material process dominates,among which China-related material process is more than twice that of America.The “Goals” are mainly“American enterprises” and “Chinese economy” in China-related material process while the “Goal” “tariff” is frequently used in America-related actor process.In this way,the reports hint that China is the “initiator” of the trade war who does harm on American enterprises and who has a tight control of Chinese economy and United States is just the victim who can do nothing but impose tariff in the trade war.In terms of attitudinal resources,there is an extensive coverage of negative Judgment and Appreciation resources in the corpus,which shows the reporters' criticism of the so-called “illegal” behavior of China and their concerns with an “unbalanced”Chinese financial system as well as the “negative impact” of the trade tensions on Chinese economy.In terms of reported modes,the reports use more indirect speech than direct speech,which shows the great interference of the reporters in the discourse.As for news sources,government leaders' words are often quoted to show the authority of the news.What's more,as for reported verbs,reported verbs from the American side are more provocative,which shows US's tough stance toward China in the trade tensions.(2)By taking advantage of the linguistic resources,the language can be “naturalized”.That is to say,reporters encode biased hegemonic discourses in the economic news reports so skillfully that readers might just accept them as solid facts without a second thought.In this way,the “naturalized” discourse become the most effective mechanism to influence readers' ideology unconsciously.Discourse hegemony of mass media thus originates from the manipulation and abuse of discourse power to control people's thought.(3)The hegemony-loaded discourse has a lot to do with the political,economic,and cultural factors in a broad social context.Most of the previous critical researches on news discourse have focused on political news,while news discourse about economic issues,which seem to be more neutral and objective,are paid much less attention to by critical analysts.Therefore,it is of great significance to conduct a Critical Discourse Analysis on economic news.Theoretically,the research not only broadens the field of Critical Discourse Analysis,but also enriches its research methods.Practically,the analysis of this dissertation helps to remind readers to keep a critical eye while reading economic news reports and not to be easily taken in by reporters' ideology.