Discourse Analysis In Critical Perspective--A Case Study Of News Reports On Sino-US Air Collision

Critical discourse analysis is a socially oriented application of linguistics 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 relationships 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.The present paper mainly conducts a critical analysis of news reports from different sources on the same incident in an attempt to identify the different ideologies embedded in the discourses. It starts with a brief review of the historical development of critical discourse analysis as well as its purpose and methodology, which is followed by an exploration of the dialectic relationship between language and ideology: the use of language is heavily influenced by ideology and the ideology is in turn transmitted and reproduced by language. The backbone of the paper is a case study in which a critical analysis is made of the Chinese and US news reports on the same event of Sino-US air collision by employing Fairclough's three-dimensional framework and the analytic tools of the metafunctions developed by Halliday.The analysis demonstrates that language is far from being a reflection of a stable social structure, but is itself a site of, and a stake in, ideological struggle.