| Legal news is new legal information that deserves to be timely informed to the receivers. Legal news report is the report of legal news by means of words, sound, images, and so on. Legal news report serves the following seven functions: spread of legal information, popularization and education on law, media watchdog on legal issues, warning and guidance, consultation service, passing legal culture as well as recreation. It plays an important part in helping mass population to better understand law and promoting the rule of law in the society. As a part of the superstructure, law embodies the will of the ruling class and is deeply imprinted with ideology. Consequently, legal news report is also imbued with ideology. By probing into the six reports on two pieces of legal news from different media organizations from a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective, this thesis aims at uncovering the ideology behind the legal news report.Critical Discourse Analysis takes language as a participant of the social practice. Language is not just shaped by social life, it shapes the social life as well. Based on the framework of Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional model, this thesis first describes the linguistic features of the text, combined with the interpretation of the features. Then it is followed by the explanation of why these linguistic choices are made. The analytic method is based on Halliday's SFG, which takes language as serving an integration of three functions: ideational function, interpersonal function, and textual function. Transitivity, lexical classification, and nominalization and passivization are introduced to express the ideational meaning. Modality is introduced to express the interpersonal meaning. Thematic choice and intertextuality are employed to express the textual meaning.In the year of 2005, China's National People's Congress passed theAnti-secession law and Saddam Hussein went on trial. These two events are the most influential legal incidents happened in the year. The author chooses six reports on them from six different media organizations. Their linguistic differences are compared and analyzed in detail. The author comes to the conclusion that there is no absolutely objective and impartial legal news report and all legal news reports are imbued with ideology. This reminds us that while reading legal news reports, we should bear in mind a critical awareness so as to unveil the ideology hidden behind the reports. Only in this way could we have a correct understanding of the legal news report and the law. |
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