A Study On American Coronavirus Pandemic Discourses: The Critical Cognitive Framework

Critical discourse analysis(CDA)is a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research that includes multiple dimensions of research approaches,and each has its own theoretical model and research paradigm.Critical cognitive linguistics is a novel interdisciplinary subject,which integrates cognitive linguistics and critical discourse analysis.The essence of critical discourse analysis is to expose and criticize the ideology,power relations and the social relations underlying the discourse.Based on Cap’s Proximization Theory combined with Fillmore’s Frame Theory,this study is a critical analysis of the news reports about the COVID-19 in mainstream American newspapers.With the aid of the self-built semantically annotated corpus,and the quantification of the proximization strategy,this thesis intends to reveal the different evaluation attitudes of the US media towards the COVID-19 pandemic in different countries(China and the U.S.)and in different periods,and unveil the ideological orientation and evaluation bias underlying the language as well as the manipulation strategies.The findings indicate that the news reports on the pandemic in China has evolved from discrediting the origin of COVID-19 to Chinese vaccines.In the outbreak period,the US media name the new virus “Chinese virus”,and slander China as the origin of the pandemic.In addition,the US media adopt the strategy of the prison frame embedded in spatial proximization,maliciously attacking China’s human rights issues,and highly politicizing the pandemic.By contrast,in the reports on the pandemic in America,the strategy of the spatial proximization is widely used by the US media to emphasize the pandemic in the U.S.is under effective control.The efficiency of rapid pandemic prevention is presented by the use of the temporal proximization.The U.S.attempts to enhance its international credibility in the way of concealing the fact.In the vaccine period,as for the reports on the pandemic in China,the US media adopt the strategy of the competition frame embedded in axiological proximization.This indicates that China’s rapid rise has greatly shaken the US hegemony in the world.China is thus regarded as one of the biggest threats.For this reason,the United States is more outspoken in issuing calumniation against China in order to legitimize its policies.In the reports on the pandemic in America,on the contrary,the spatial proximization is greatly used to promote the efficacy and safety of the American vaccines,so as to plunder the international vaccine market.The strategies concluded in this study may enhance the audience’s critical awareness and contribute to the construction of China’s diplomatic discourse.Hopefully the integrated model established in this study on the basis of Proximization Theory may also provide a new perspective for the study of discourse analysis,and find their applications in other relevant fields.