| Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA) emerged in 1970 s and has undergone a great development since then. CDA is an interdisciplinary approach which is particularly concerned about the use and abuses of language for the exercise of socio-political power which will strongly influence and manipulate people's value and belief. Discourse, no matter what genre, can never be totally impartial, especially the seemingly objective news report.Though CDA has already been used to analyze news report in previous studies, news on AIIB deserves special attentions since it is one of the latest international affairs. After China proposed to establish the international financial institution Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank(AIIB), more and more countries, including major allies of the Unites States, claimed to join even though USA urged them to think twice before signing up. The situation frightened USA authority and American news reports say that China is seeking the dominant positon in the world which was definitely unfair to China. To attest how ideology and power relations are buried in the seemingly neutral news reports, in this thesis, twenty news reports with a time span of more than three months were selected from the New York Times, which is one of the most influential news media in USA.Adopting Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional model as the analytic procedures and M.A.K.Halliday's systemic-functional grammar as theoretical foundation, the twenty news samples can be analyzed from four aspects within the CDA domain: 1. modality(tense, direct/indirect speech and vague language); 2. transitivity(material process, mental process, verbal process and relational process); 3. presupposition and 4. metaphor.News reports, which should be the unbiased reflections of realities, are never value-free since the reporters are affected by the society and they are on behalf of the interests of some particular group of people. Through the analysis of these twenty news reports, it is clear that the American government is unsatisfied with the China-proposed AIIB and even scared for the rise of China.After analyzing these twenty news reports on AIIB from the New York Times, conclusions of this thesis can be listed as follow:1) News reports can never be completely objective and value-free since they are productions affected by not only the mainstream ideologies of the country but also the political attitudes of reporters. Readers should improve their critical thinking when reading news reports since ideology and power relations buried in the news reports in a hidden way;2) As a turning point of Sino-US relation, the establishment of AIIB has caused great influences among the entire world. The New York Times is one of the main-stream media in US, thus through analyzing news about AIIB on it, the US government's hostile attitude towards AIIB even towards China can be traced;2) Many words in the New York Times' news reports are biased and American mainstream media are misleading readers by manipulating the discourse right. It is suggested above that analyze news reports within CDA domain can help readers to improve critical awareness and not be misled by the news producers' language skills. |
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