Critical Discourse Analysis Of Gm In Swine Flu-related News Reports About China In The New York Times

Critical Discourse Analysis aims to expose the relationship between language, society and underlying ideology through analyzing the linguistic phenomenon, especially the prejudice, discrimination and the distorted facts which are taken for granted by people.By drawing on Fairclough's three-dimensional model and the analytical tool of Halliday's Grammatical Metaphor, this thesis endeavors to expose the hidden ideology in the 15 news reports in The New York Times, which are concerned about the policies and measures of prevention and cure when facing Swine flu through the analysis of ideational and interpersonal grammatical metaphors, thus help the readers see through the appearance of language to perceive the essence. Furthermore, the researcher tries to summary the image of China in the American's eyes and analyzes the reasons for such reports. Finally, she assumes some suggestions to protect the image of China in American media and consequently, this may urge the U.S. reports to be objective and fair. Thereby the present research extends the research area of CDA and, on the other hand, proposes some suggestions to construing China's image.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction of the aims, significance and methodology of the research. Chapter two reviews the previous CDA studies of news reports at home and abroad and from this part the author got the inspiration of this research. In Chapter three, the framework and analytical tool of the thesis are introduced. In Chapter four the 15 pieces of news in the corpus are analyzed by drawing on GM and then Fairclough's three-dimensional model is followed to make a discussion. The conclusion is given in Chapter 5. The author makes a summary of the functions GM played in news reporting and points out that the root cause of the prejudiced reports is the ideological factors. The limitations and research direction are presented in the end.