| The 2010 Shanghai Exposition is another international gala held within Chinese territory after 2008 Beijing Olympics was successfully attracting the worldwide attention. The United States, as the only superpower, faces the challenges from the newly rising powers, including China. It is based on this fact that this thesis starts a critical discourse analysis of the news reports on 2010 Shanghai Exposition by the New York Times, which reflects the mainstream media in the United States.The concept of critical discourse analysis was firstly proposed by Fowler in 1979 and formed into the terminology in 1989 by Fairclough. Critical discourse analysis regards that the ideology is hidden behind language and aims to uncover the ideological stances and power relationship embedded in the linguistic structures. Critical discourse analysis takes Halliday"s Systematic Functional Grammar and Xin Bin's Intertextuality as the source of analytical tools which consist of lexical choice, transitivity, modality, news source and reporting mode in this thesis. The sample texts from the nine news reports by the New York Times are analyzed from linguistic level and social-historical level.The importance of this thesis lies in that through the critical discourse analysis of the news reports by the New York Times on 2010 Shanghai Exposition, the author proves the idea that news language is influenced by ideology and suggests readers to build up a critical thinking in reading news reports. As concluded in this thesis, news reports makers shape the readers' perception of Chinese government and 2010 Shanghai Exposition through ideologically colored news language. Chinese government is portrayed as a totalitarian government and Shanghai Exposition is regarded as an exposition with little respect to human right and intellectual property. |
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