A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And American Media Reports On COVID-19 Pandemic

COVID-19 pandemic has been the focus of all major news media since its emergence.In this paper,news reports on COVID-19 pandemic from China Daily and New York Times are selected as the research subjects.Corpus of China Daily(CCD)and Corpus of the New York Times(CNYT)are built through Factiva database and critical discourse analysis is conducted to examine the descriptive and intertextual characteristics,social background of the news reports under the framework of the three-dimensional model of Fairclough.The main findings of this study are as follows.Firstly,the descriptive characteristics of the news reports as represented by CCD and CNYT are revealed in terms of high-frequency words,modal verbs and transitivity.With unique high-frequency words indicating separate specific themes,both share high-frequency words like “covid”,“coronavirus”,“health”,“patients” etc.,which are also closely related to the theme of reports.In addition,modal verbs are widely used in both conveying different themes.Analysis on transitivity shows that both governments attach great importance to the epidemic situation and conveys the confidence to tide over the epidemic.CCD reports tend to describe active anti-pandemic actions and call for prevention and control of the pandemic.While CNYT reports,with some doubts about Chinese anti-pandemic policies,focus on obstacles in the anti-pandemic process,reminding people to take reasonable measures for protection.Secondly,analysis on intertextuality from news sources and reporting modes,which shows that both media describe the grim situation of the pandemic and confidence in fighting the epidemic,reveals similar result to what is in the description stage.Most of the reports in CCD are positive and convey strong belief of defeating the pandemic while the CNYT reports describe the tough situation in anti-pandemic process,the prospect of beating the pandemic as well as some doubts regarding Chinese anti-epidemic process.Thirdly,in the interpretation stage,the study finds that the content of news reports is affected by political,economic and cultural reasons of the two countries.This study proves the effectiveness of applying Fairclough’s three-dimensional theory on the critical discourse analysis of news reports,and the use of corpus-based approach might provide some useful reference for similar researches in the future.