Critical Discourse Analysis On News Discourse ——Taking Reports On The Meng Wanzhou Case As An Example

The promotion of “Created by China” innovates the industrial chain shifting from low-end processing manufacturing to high-end technical innovation.Owing to the world number two by nominal GDP and number one in the world by purchasing power parity,China has attracted attention from all over the world and the reports about China are soaring.Huawei,a well-known leading information and communications technology company,a Chinese mobile handset manufacturer,dominates the headlines abroad and at home.As the first company to develop large-scale 5G commercial deployment capabilities,Huawei has a profound influence in the field.On December 1st,2018,Meng Wanzhou,the chief financial officer of Huawei,was temporarily detained by the Canadian authorities on behalf of the U.S.government when she was transferring planes in Canada.The coverage of relevant news involves the political,diplomatic relations and economic competition among major powers in the world.For sure,the reports also reflect the dominant ideologies of each country.This study aims to analyze the news reports in Canadian and American media on the Meng Wanzhou case from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.In this study,two small corpora are constructed by collecting the reports about Meng Wanzhou case from The Globe and Mail of Canada and The New York Times of America.Through the analysis of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model,this paper makes a critical analysis from the perspectives of lexical choice,modality,news source,and quotation.The research hopes to make contributions to the Meng Wanzhou case from linguistic view.To be more specific,this research aims to find out the language features,discourse paradigms,and the relationship between discourse paradigms and ideology in such news reports.The conclusions of the study are as follows: 1)generally speaking,The Globe and Mail uses more professional and complex words and syntax structures,while the variation of sentence pattern is more diverse in The New York Times,hence it can draw more attention from readers;2)The Globe and Mail and The New York Times make a comprehensive description of the event framework by grasping the keywords respectively.However,The Globe and Mail is biased in favor of a description of the correctness of Canada’s domestic judicial procedure,while The New York Times focuses on the international trade and relations related to the case;3)in terms of the presentation of news sources,the two media have shown unfairness to Chinese voice,that is,the news sources from Chinese side are neglected.However,when quoting western statements,most of the sources are named.Through this study,the researcher hopes to inspire readers to build awareness of critical reading and avoid being manipulated by news reports.At the same time,the researcher advocates that journalists and reporters can raise their awareness of language usage and strengthen their sense of caution and responsibility in future reports.