A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And American News Reports On China's Economic Inflation

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a new branch of modern linguistics. It seeks to reveal the relationship between language and ideology which is hidden in public discourses from the perspective of linguistics, sociology, psychology and mass communication.China's economic inflation is a core issue at home and abroad recently. The present study, adopting critical discourse analysis as its theoretical framework and analytic approach, makes a contrast analysis of China Daily and New York Times news reports on China's economic inflation.First, the author introduces the development of CDA and main studies of CDA at home and abroad. The focus is Halliday's systemic functional grammar and Faircough's three-dimensional model.Then the news sample discourses are analyzed at three levels—text, discourse representation and social practice. At textual level, the samples are analyzed in terms of transitivity, classification and modality. At discourse representation level, the samples are analyzed in terms of intertextuality, which includes modes of representation, news sources and reporting verbs. At social practice level, the samples are analyzed in historical, cultural and political perspectives. The thesis tries to identify the similarities and differences between Chinese and American news reports on China's economic inflation and explore the ideologies embedded in the reports.Finally the author draws the conclusion that there're differences between Chinese and American news reports on China's economic inflation. Chinese reports are more neutral and objective and American reports tend to be negative, which represents the different ideologies caused by political, historical and cultural influences. Besides, there are similarities, which are mainly attributed to the characteristics of the genre of news reports.