| With the continuous development of mass media, news, as a main means of diffusing information, has become the subject of a great deal of intellectual scrutiny. What is of particular interest here is the passive voice in news discourse because of the essential role it plays in news discourse. Many linguists study passive voice on the basis of different linguistic theories and great progress have been achieved in the perception of this linguistic phenomenon.However, the early studies on passive voice are restricted to the domain of grammar and literary study. Contemporary studies of passive voice have significantly shifted their attention from the traditional concern with syntactic or grammatical structures to the situated accounts of passive voices which are connected with historical and social contexts and discourse types. Still most of them fail to focus on the relationship between the use of passive voice and writers'purpose.Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) makes up for this deficiency. According to critical discourse analysis, news has never been absolutely objective and fair. It is motivated by various political and power groups in order to convey implicit ideology in certain contexts. Passive voice is one of the linguistic structures that are appropriate for expressing implicit ideology. Analysts must take contextual factors into consideration so as to reveal the implicit ideology hidden behind passive voice.In this thesis, passive voice is analyzed from three aspects to prove that it is more appropriate for authors to convey certain ideology in news discourses. 1) By hiding the agent, it can be used to weaken the agentivity in two ways. One is deleting the agent to obscure the perpetrator of wrong deeds; the other is expanding the agent to secure support from readers. 2) passive voice can be seen as a thematization. 3) it can change the information focus of clauses in order to convey implicit ideology. There are also two ways: stressing focus and contrasting focus.This thesis analyses passive voice in news discourse from the perspective of CDA in order to reveal the deep meaning of discourses and cultivate people's critical consciousness. |
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