| Critical discourse analysis is a newly developed branch of discourse analysis, which aims to discover the relationship between language, power, and ideology through language itself from the perspectives of linguistics, sociology, and psychology. Most CDA studies take political news and economic news as texts. However, news on terrorist attacks is rarely examined. The choice of reports on Somali piracy attacks is a virgin land, in the hope that the existing critical news discourses can be extended.This thesis adopts Fairclough's three-dimentional model as the theoretical framework and Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar as the analytic instrument. According to Fairclough, three stages of CDA are distinguished in the thesis as: discourse, discursive practice and social practice. Firstly, the analysis of the first level is carried out in terms of lexical choice, transitivity analysis, and modality. Secondly, the study of the discursive level focuses on discourse representation in the samples, that is, sources and modes are targets for analysis. In the end, the broader social context is examined to explain the ideology which decides the linguistic choice in the news discourses.The results unveil that reports on Somali piracy attacks are far from value-free. The reporters employ linguistic devices and discourse representation to describe that, Somali piracy has been an evil global enemy, Chinese and international community have been cooperated to eradicate the crimes of piracy. Such representation is closely associated with the ideological stances of the reporters.Thus through the critical discourse analysis in the news, it can not only provide us a different perspective of discourse analysis but also be helpful for most readers to improve their critical language awareness during news reading. Meanwhile, critical discourse analysis can provide a means of unmasking the hidden ideology in linguistic representation. Furthermore, Fairclough's three-dimensional model and Halliday's Systemic-Functional Analysis can be widely used in discourse analysis. |
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