A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Interpersonal Meanings In News Reports

With the rapid development of mass media, media discourse is arguably one of the most influential written text types in contemporary society, influencing, as it does, the politics, economy and culture. Media discourse is the main source of people's knowledge, attitudes and ideologies, both of elites as well as of ordinary citizens (van Dijk, 1998a) .Media discourse can be divided into many subtypes, among which the news report is a particular one (张德禄, 1998:317) .Countless scholars have seriously tried to define and analyze news reports from various perspectives, among which the critical analysis is an important one.In the news report which is viewed as a particular type of communicative events between the newsgiver (the socially situated news reporter and editor) and the reader, the newsgiver always claims that his coverage is neutral and objective. But even media theorists typically regard the news as a mechanism of social control. CDA practitioners argue that discourse, especially public discourse, shapes and is shaped by society. It helps to constitute and is shaped by relations of power, and invested with ideologies (Fairclough, 1992a: 8-10). CDA practitioners argue that discourse (language use), especially news discourse is not neutral at all, and are engaged to unveil the interrelationships between discourse, ideology and power. CDA is viewed as an instrumental linguistics (Halliday, 1978: 36-58), and draws heavily upon Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereinafter called SFL), especially the theories of "language as social semiotic", genre, register and three metafunctions.In terms of their interpersonal metafunctions/meanings, news reports have two functions: (i) report the latest newsworthy events; (ii) try to influence the reader's worldviews and attitude. However, the newsgiver's orientation is not directly expressed ( 张德禄 , 1998: 318). Then, how does the newsgiver reproduce the reality encoding the ideologies and power relations into the seemingly neutral language toinfluence the reader? Through what linguistic resources are interpersonal meanings realized at the lexicogrammatical level? How are the newsgiver's attitude and motivation like? How should the reader respond to the ideology invested news reports? These are the questions we are going to ask and answer in this thesis.The present thesis is set out to synthesize relevant theories of CD A, SFL and stylistics to study the interpersonal meanings in news reports and then explore how ideologies and power relations are naturalized and reproduced in them. The introductfon deals with the rationale, research questions, procedure, significance and structure of the study. Chapter 2 firstly reviews the history, development, etc. of CD A, then elaborates on the interrelationships between discourse, power and ideology, and finally reviews the CDA studies on media discourse. Chapter 3 firstly elaborates on Fairclough's model of CDA, then deals with theories of language and social context, register and three metafunctions, language as social semion'c in SFL, and elaborates on the interpersonal metafunctions/meanings and its realizations at the lexico-grammatical level. Finally, a tentative framework is concluded. Chapter 4 begins with the materials and method used in the study, and goes on to description, analysis and interpretation. Chapter 5 is the concluding section where the summary of the study, pedagogical implications of the study and speculations on further studies are presented.The study shows that interpersonal meanings are realized around mood prosodically, mainly by such linguistic resources as mood, modality, speech reporting, evaluation, appellation system, tense and voice. At the macro level (between the newsgiver and the reader), the newsgiver, who is expected to report me news events objectively, controls the news discourse. He makes use of his power and access to the news sources and often inserts consciously or unconsciously his own comment and attitude so as to influence the reader. His orientation is generally expressed implicitly through selecting, organizing, categorizing and ordering the news. He determines who should speak, how to speak, and how much. As a result, at the micro level (between participants in the news events), participants are recreated and represented in the news, sometimes greatly differently from those in reality. Through the study of theauthentic news items, we find that the seemingly similar reports from the five newspapers and magazines are in fact subtly different. The attitude of mass media in Group A and Group B is greatly differently. Chinese news reports (Group A) quote from various sources, but basically reflect Chinese governmental opinions. By contrast, the U.S. news reports (Group B) largely quote from the U.S. president Bush and his administration, sometimes the E.U. leaders, but rarely the Chinese government. It is fundamentally in line with the U.S. governmental views. Behind the subtle differences in linguistic properties are the newsgiver's control and great ideological differences between the two nations. We have every reason to believe that our study is inspiring for English study as well as for how we can improve our English teaching.