A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Economic News Reports

As a new approach of linguistics, critical discourse analysis (CDA) has been drawing more and more attention from scholars since the birth of it in the late 1970s. Public discourses, including news discourses, official documents and political speeches, etc., have always been of great interest to critical linguists, being the main object of the critical studies. News reports, as one of the most popular public discourses, are important channels of information transmission in modern society, exerting extensive effects on people's life. As the American media is the most powerful in the international communications and its international reports greatly influence other nations'images in the world, a critical study of the internal and external features of language in the American media's reports about China will help people know more about how the media produces news and pictures China. However, most of the previous studies are more or less politics-oriented. Economic news reports draw quite little attention. Therefore, the present study will take economic news reports about China by the American media as the object of critical discourse analysis.This thesis makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the economic news reports about China in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in 2010 by searching the EBSCO database to get the data needed. Questions about the content and the overall attitudes in the reports are dealt with in the quantitative study. For the qualitative analysis, it adopts Fairclough's three-dimensional model as the theoretical framework and Halliday's systematic functional grammar as the analytical tools. Within the framework,data analysis is conducted at the levels of text, discursive practice and social practice. At the textual level, transitivity and lexical classification are explored to describe the linguistic features. Modality and discourse representation are examined at the discursive level to study the intertexturality of news discourses. And analysis at the level of social practice focuses on investigating the textual choices in the light of political, historical and cultural contexts in which texts are produced, to justify the interpretation made at the level of discursive practice.The study finds that economic news is not objective to a certain degree and could also be used as a medium to convey the ideologies of the powerful group. The reports on China's economy in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are far from value-free. They do not simply report the economy itself, but connect it with other elements, intending to shape a negative image of China. This is closely related to the political, economic and cultural differences between the two countries.The findings imply that it is necessary to raise people's critical language awareness. On the one hand, pedagogically, CDA should be taught in language courses as a supplement to linguistic knowledge to help promote language learners'awareness of how discourse molds readers'views. On the other hand, Chinese journalists must increase their awareness of the basic values of our own and other cultures to help foreigners know about China and build a positive national image of China.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one briefly deals with the background, the research questions, the purpose and significance, the methodology and the organization of this study. Chapter two reviews the previous studies carried out both at home and abroad. Chapter three introduces the theoretical framework and analytical tools of this study---Fairclough's three-dimensional model and Halliday's systematic functional grammar. Chapter four deals with the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the economic news reports from the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Chapter five summarizes the content of the whole thesis, giving answers to the research questions raised in chapter one and presenting the implications of this study. It also points out the limitations of this research and gives suggestions for further studies.