A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On China In American Newspapers

Critical linguistics (CL) was proposed by British linguists Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress, etc. in 1979. Following that critical discourse analysis (CDA) came into being. CDA, usually approached from the angles of linguistics, sociology, psychology and mass media, aims to uncover the relations between language, power and ideology through analysis of linguistic forms. CDA is particularly interested in how ideology influences discourse, how discourse reacts to ideology and how they both originate from social structures and power relations, and serve society as well. Within CL, language is not an objective and transparent transmission media as claimed by ..previous linguists, rather language is a kind of social practice, an intervening force in social processes. Language not only reflects society but also directly gets involved in the makings of social things and social relations.The philosophical foundation of CL is the Frankfurt School's Western Marxism. CL can be seen as an application of Western critical theory into language in particular. The Frankfurt School attaches importance to effects of culture (language as one aspect of culture) on social life, seeing domination and exploitation as established and maintained culturally and ideologically in language. They insist that cultural processes influence social life and constitute a domain of social struggles. The main theoretical foundations of CL are Sapir-Whorf's 'linguistic relativism' and 'linguistic determinism', and Hallidayan 'systemic functional grammar' which provides major theoretical and methodological sources for Fowler's analytic model.The main research objects of CDA are public discourses from TV, newspapers, broadcasts, official documents, laws and codes, etc. Through analysis of various discourses, analysts can discover the relations between language and ideology, which are usually unnoticeable by the public, and disclose how the powerful classes employ language to shape the ideology of the public so as to protect their own interests and to maintain the existing social structures. CDA aims to uncover dominance, discrimination, power and control as expressed, signaled, constituted,...