A Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese And English Political News Discourses From A Critical Perspective

Critical Linguistics, also called Critical Discourse Analysis, is a new branch in linguistic analysis which combines the achievements of scientific researches in the field of linguistics, sociology, psychology, and mass media etc in the study of language use and it is receiving more and more attention from scholars of different disciplines. One of the major theoretical and methodological resources of critical linguistics is Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar which has been applied to the study of many fields associated with language study, such as in autobiographies, novels, poems, advertising discourses etc. As for its application in the field of journalistic discourses, Fairclough, Fowler, Van Dijk, Xin Bin, and Chen Zhongzhu, have done a lot of researches, mainly on individual news articles or comparative studies of Chinese and American journalistic discourses. This thesis is a tentative application of Halliday's Functional Grammar to a comparative study of China, America, British and Iraq's journalistic discourses (in the English version) concerning the execution of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.To construct the theoretical basis for the whole thesis, the writer first introduces the basic notion and theoretical basis for Critical Linguistics, Halliday's Functional Grammar. Critical Linguistics aims to integrate language and language use with its ideological meaning. The writer points out that Halliday's theory of classification, transformation, the transitivity system, modality, thematic structures shows the language user's estimation and uncertainty about things. On the basis of this, the writer proposes a working solution for the analysis of ideology-- Halliday's theory is mainly conducted from the angle of grammar. So the writer intends to find a better way to analyze in a broader scope how journalistic discourses reflect different ideologies and power relationships. In order to set up a solid foundation for the analysis that follows, then the writer gives a brief introduction to the related background information around Saddam Hussein's execution, such as reasons for the death penalty, the execution itself and its effects on the world order, the American, Chinese, Iraqi and British government's different attitudes towards the whole affair. Lastly, the writer makes a comparative study of the news reports on the death penalty to support the arguments that have been made previously.From the comparative study of the news reports, the writer draws the conclusion that critical discourse analysis is a powerful tool for probing into the relationship between language, power and ideology. My analysis shows that language not only reflects society but also takes part in the constitution of social things and relationships. The significance of the present study lies in its fairly effective analytic approach and its representative linguistic corpus---news reports on the execution of Saddam Hussein from the four government's website of China Daily, the Guardian, the New York Times and Iraq Today. The analysis moves beyond the simple description of linguistic phenomena, and tries to reveal the different ideologies hidden in them so that readers may have a better understanding of journalistic discourses and journalistic criticism as well.