A Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis Of News About "Sexual Assault" In China Daily And The New York Times

The Weinstein scandal that occurred in 2017 had made the issue of sexual assault a hot-button topic in recent years,which also acted as a catalyst for the fast progression of the well-known “MeToo Movement”.By employing theories from Critical Discourse Analysis and utilizing self-built corpora,this study sets out to explore the similarities and differences in the discursive construction of the social issue “sexual assault” in the Chinese and American authoritative newspaper,China Daily and the New York Times.Corpus techniques including keyword,collocation,and concordance as well as thematic concentration are applied to dissect news discourse and the discoveries are explained in political and socio-cultural contexts.The major findings of the research are summarized as follows:(1)The two newspapers share similarities in reporting the issue whereas they also have their own foci.CD attaches more importance to the discussion of the problem and the safety of victims while NYT prefers to report on actual cases and pays close attention to perpetrators.(2)CD presents to the readers a positive government that has already taken measures and will take further steps to control the situation,despite some expectations not met.Nonetheless,NYT tends to make negative comments on governments from other countries for their incompetence.(3)Both CD and NYT portray the public as active discussion participants,suggestion providers,and action performers.Moreover,people are also depicted as compassionate towards the victims in CD.(4)The prevailing “MeToo Movement” is considered by CD to have contributed significantly to the combat against sexual assault,whereas NYT constructs it as a double-edged sword.(5)Ideologies behind political and sociocultural backgrounds would have significant influences on the construction of news discourse.Under the guidance of socialist principles and Confucian philosophies,Chinese media make a point of the welfare of its people and portray a responsible government.In contrast,American media tend to criticize the violation of justice and depict developing countries like China and Nepal negatively since Americans uphold capitalism and global hegemony.The majority of previous studies that take sexual assault as the topic place emphasis on the representation of the victim and perpetrator,whereas this study highlights the differences in image construction of government and attitudes towards social factors(the “MeToo Movement”)in Chinese and American news media.Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of the texts,the research is supposed to enlighten the readers on the relations between language and ideology,and meanwhile provide implications for Chinese media to construct a better image of China to the world.