A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Sino-US Trade War From Chinese And American Mainstream Media

Critical discourse analysis（CDA）is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of written and spoken texts that views language as a form of social practice and aims to disclose the relations of discourse,power and ideology.News discourse has long been established as a major research subject in CDA studies.As Xin Bin（2005:84）notes,news discourse,like any other types of discourse,incorporates or reflects the journalists’stance and viewpoint and therefore,cannot be an absolutely objective reflection of truth and social reality.On July 6^th,2018,the US fired the first shot of“the largest-scale trade war in economic history”when the US’scheduled tariffs on$34 billion in Chinese products took effect.The Sino-US trade war has a far-reaching global impact and has aroused wide public attention.The previous studies on this trade war are mainly carried out from an economic and political perspective,while few focuses on how the event is reported in mass media.In view of this,this thesis adopts the approach of CDA to make a comparative analysis of Chinese and American news reports on the 2018 Sino-US trade war,in hope of uncovering the ideologies and power relations hidden behind the news discourse.The theoretical underpinnings of the present study are Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar.Four mainstream newspapers are selected as data sources and two corpora are built,namely,Corpus C and Corpus A.The former comprises 150 pieces of news articles from China Daily and Global Times,and the latter contains 116 pieces from The New York Times and The Washington Post.Using both qualitative and corpus-based quantitative methods,this thesis conducts critical analysis of news discourse concerning Sino-US trade war from three dimensions,i.e.description,interpretation and explanation.The major findings of this study are as follows:At the stage of description,text analysis concentrates mainly upon three analytical approaches:classification,lexical cohesion and modality.First of all,analysis of keyword lists shows that news reports in the two countries have both similarities and differences in terms of focus of attention.Secondly,the semantic analysis of collocates of“trade war”helps make clear how lexical cohesion is achieved in news.While the shared collocates are indicative of some common concerns,the unique collocates suggest that Chinese and American newspapers hold different stances on the trade war.As for modality,a predilection for median value modal verbs in both corpora reflects reporters’endeavor to be objective.Nevertheless,newspapers show different attitudes and tones by using modal verbs in a different way.At the interpretation stage,analysis of news source shows that the majority of reported speeches are from specific sources,among which the voices of social power-holders are most represented.American and Chinese newspapers use unspecified and indistinguishable sources differently so as to serve their own interests.In terms of reporting mode,direct discourse and indirect discourse take the largest proportion.However,in comparison,American reporters exert more interference when reporting others’words and tend to establish a negative image of China.At the explanation stage,political,economic and cultural factors are taken into account to further explain the discoveries in textual analysis and intertextual analysis.It can be summarized that different social and cultural contexts between China and the US,including political systems,foreign policies,economic conditions,trade policies,cultural patterns and communication habits,have largely affected and determined the distinctive features of news discourse in the two countries.The findings of the study can enrich perspectives on the issue of Sino-US trade war.Meanwhile,it enables readers to gain an understanding of the delicate connection between language and ideology,and offers implications for Chinese media to adopt more effective communication strategies to secure China’s voice in the international community.