The Discourses Of Google's Departure From China

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a newly developed branch of linguistics studies; it aims to study the relationship between language, power and ideology. It is initiated by critical linguistics and widely used in news discourse, political propaganda, official documents, regulations, interviews and so on.Media discourse has received special scrutiny in the study of CDA, language in news is supposed to be true and objective, but it is unavoidable to reflect the reporters' subjective opinions. The most traditional approaches to the media language are in the field of linguistics which tend to focus more on language and its use, while in this thesis, the purpose of this study is not only to lay bare the ideologies and power in the media language by analyzing different reports of the Google affair from the linguistic perspective, but also analyze the media language in relation to the social context; this thesis will combine the studies of linguistics with the sociology to provide the richest ground for the relationships between media language and power, and help evoke people's critical awareness of language.The news report about Google's departure from China is a very good case for the study of CDA. It was a big event in 2010 and has caused a huge uproar in the world, it influenced Chinese users and the even the Sino-US relations. There are many social and ideological factors behind it. Besides, not only the reports about it uncover the relationship between the language and ideology, even the Google's departure from china, the event itself, reveals the relations between media language and the ideology in the society.The news reports are analyzed in a contrastive manner to work out comprehensive linguistic features which are loaded with hidden messages. Based on Fairclough's three-dimensional model and Halliday's Systemic-functional grammar, this thesis develops a theoretic framework and gives a detailed analysis of different versions of the Google affair reports to dig out what is embedded in the language and how the ideology and power is hidden in the text.In the first chapter, this thesis will introduce the background of this research, the aim and research questions. Chapter two deals with the literature review of the CDA and the research of Fairclough's three-dimensional framework. Chapter three will introduce the process of data collection and data analysis procedure. Chapter four is a detailed analysis of different versions of the Google affair reports within Fairclough's framework.