A Comparative Media Discourse Analysis From The Perspective Of CDA

Critical discourse analysis is a socially oriented application of linguistic analysis, which heavily draws on the notions and methods associated with the systemic-functional linguistics developed by Halliday. It seeks to make clear the relationships between language and its social conditions of possible existence and in particular the relationship between language and ideology, which has frequently been taken for granted as commonsense by the people and totally accepted by them. Critical discourse analysis aims to expose those connections by means of linguistic analysis so as to help people realize the ideologies embedded in the language and avoid accepting them passively.This thesis attempts to conduct a qualitative research of ideological tendencies in media discourses from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. The main task is to build an effective model based on Fairclough's three-dimensional model and Halliday's systemic-functional grammar and to analyze ideological differences in media discourses by journalists from diverse backgrounds.Chapter One elucidates the background, purpose and the importance of the present research.Chapter Two reviews theories and methods of critical discourse analysis and states similarities and differences between diverse approaches. It proceeds to elaborate on Fariclough's three-dimensional model and Halliday's three metafunctions of language. Moreover, it illustrates the characteristics of media discourse and the relationship among media discourse, critical discourse analysis and ideology.Chapter Three conducts a critical analysis of a series of news reports through a week from China Daily and South China Morning Post (SCMP) respectively reporting on the same event of Article 23 in 2003 in attempt to identify the different ideologies embedded in the discourses. The study adopts Fairclough's three-dimensional model as analytical framework. For discourse analysis, it borrows from Halliday's three metafunctions of language and examines linguistic features of the two media from multiple angles as transitivity, modality, voice, theme/rheme and lexical classification. In discursive practice analysis, the notion of"intertextuality"is introduced to describe the phenomenon that texts are mutually constructed and intertextuality is the process of inheriting, reforming and upgrading historical texts.Chapter Four, the concluding chapter, summarizes the major findings of the whole thesis and presents some pedagogical implications for teachers and English learners.