A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On "Huiyuan Juice Case" In American Broadsheets

Critical Discourse Analysis (also called Critical Linguistics), which was first put forward by Fowler et al in their book Language and Control, is an approach of discourse analysis. Going above the surface layer of language, it aims at revealing how ideology impacts discourse from perspectives of sociology, mass communication, psychology, etc.The present thesis analyzes reports of an economy issue in American newspapers from the perspective of CDA. Coke Cola Company made a bid to merge Huiyuan Juice Group. Scholars studied this issue from different aspects, such as economy, trade, anti-monopoly, foreign relations, etc. Under the theory of CDA, the present researcher chooses linguistic aspect, analyzing 11 news samples in American broadsheets. The thesis makes a linguistic contribution to the study of this issue. It is hoped that the research will uncover the ideology behind news reports. Meanwhile, the thesis will reinforce people's critical literacy awareness.Fairclough's three-dimensional model is adopted in the analysis, in which three stages are involved, namely, description, interpretation and explanation. In description, linguistic features of the chosen data are analyzed. Transitivity, Transformation and Lexical classification are analytical tools; in interpretation, the analysis is at discursive level, the Intertextuality of data is analyzed in three perspectives: news source, reporting mode and reporting verb; in explanation, the analysis is at societal level. Ideologies hidden in the data are analyzed from the angles of history, politics and Sino-U.S. relations.It is found after the research that economy news discourses are regarded as being neutral and objective, but they are still controlled by idea and ideology of the reporter. Business trades between the two countries are so frequent that their economic interests are closely bound up, so there is an independent relation in economy. The official response of the USA is acceptance and respect on Chinese government's final decision. In this aspect, China's image in American newspapers is not all negative. Nevertheless, American media try all different means to ascribe diverges of the two countries to different political systems and insinuate negative opinion on China in the reports. There are some political, historical and cultural factors to make this happen.