A Critical Discourse Analysis Of American News Articles On Immigration

During the past decades, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) researchers have increasinglydeveloped their research theories, methodologies and topics to answer questions about therelationships between language and society. In most studies Halliday's systemic functional grammar(SFG) is preferred to be used as the linguistic study tool (Wodak, 1999), and among the various topicsthe current interest is given to racism and issues related (van Dijk, 1997) such as immigration racism.This research is grounded in CDA to uncover the discursive strategies applied by Americanonline mass media as well as their underlying ideology. The data were collected from the websites of 8authoritative news agencies in America such as CNN, Associated Press (AP), etc. according to theircommon theme of immigration. Wodak's Discourse-Historical approach (DHA) (2001) was employedas both theoretical and methodological perspective to expose and reconstruct the racist language usedin American online news articles on immigrations issues taking both quantitative and qualitativeanalysis into account.The result shows that the extra linguistic emphasis of online news discourse is placed on threetypes of discursive strategies which are all involved in the positive self and negative otherspresentations. They are nomination/referential strategy, predication strategy, and argumentationstrategy by using of topoi. Most of them were triggered by the use of vocabulary to construct,legitimize as well as mitigate the group boundary and anti-immigrant utterances either implicitly orexplicitly.The academic significance of this research is that it exposes the linguistic strategies used in onlinenews reports so that the social functions of language processing can be clarified. At the same time, itexemplifies the analytical power of CDA by illustrating how language is utilized as a tool forideolog ical ends and of DHA by demonstrating an interdisciplinary synergistic framework based onboth linguistic and social dimensions. It also introduces a"multi-modal"approach to text selection ofracism discourse analysis, expanding the realm of study from merely print-based media to web-basedmedia. Moreover, this work is also practically important. It was written with the intention of arousingthe audience's critical awareness towards the language use in online news discourses as well as theirconsciousness of the significance of interdisciplinary knowledge.