Critical Discourse Analysis Of China's Natural Disaster News In The New York Times

With a long history, Discourse Analysis (DA) can be traced back to the rhetorics of ancient Greece and Roman times. Originated in the 1950s, DA has become a complex, interdisciplinary research field. From different research perspectives, the researchers hold-different definitions of discourse and discourse analysis.Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), also known as "Critical Linguistics" is a kind of methodology on discourse analysis originating from the 1970s in the United Kingdom. Through the analysis of the characteristics of the language of discourse and its social and historical background, CDA intends to examine the ideology hidden behind the meaning, especially the relationship among the language, power and ideology. News discourse has been the focus in the research of Critical Discourse Analysis. But in the review we found that most of the studies selected political news as the corpus, while sufficient research has not been carried out on the reports of natural disasters. For this reason, this study is to select natural disaster news as the object of discourse analysis to make a supplement to the existing critical discourse analysis.The study has selected 47 news reports on China's natural disasters from the website of The New York Times, covering earthquakes, floods, snowstorms, landslides and so on with the time spanning from 1992 to 2008. This study attempts to explore whether these reports are subject to the influence of ideology. If so, what kind of ideologies they are and how these ideologies are embodied? What is the relationship between the ideologies and political and cultural context?Based on Halliday's functional linguistics, the study adopts three-dimensional model of Fairclough, that is, to regard news discourse as the unity of text, discourse practice and social practice to carry out the analysis. At the level of text, transitivity, modality and classification are analyzed to inspect the language features; at the level of discourse practice, analysis is carried out through the news sources and reporting modes to research the intertextuality; at the level of social practice, the news discourse has been placed in the political, historical and cultural contexts to search for an explanation.This thesis is divided into six chapters. The first chapter is the introduction dealing with the origin, the purpose, the significance, and a general outline of thesis. The second chapter is a literature review. We go through briefly the birth and development of CDA, and the conception of language, ideology and power. Famous critical studies home and abroad are also reviewed selectively, more or less detailed, according to their relevance to the current research. The third chapter introduces the theoretical framework of the current study based on the Halliday's functional linguistics and three-dimensional model of Fairclough. Chapter 4 is methodology, referring to the data collection, justification for samplings and the procedures of data analyses. Then data analyses and discussions are made in chapter 5. The samples are analyzed at the textual, discursive and societal levels. Results and findings are also presented in this part. In sixth chapter a summary is made of the study and limitations and further suggestions of the study are also presented.