Critical Discourse Analysis Of Negative China-related News Reports In New York Times

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that studies the relationships among language,ideology and power.CDA practitioners stress that there is a dialectical relationship between language and the social context.Critical discourse analysis is mainly to identify and analyze those ideological assumptions hidden in the text that have largely been taken for granted.Throughout the development of CDA,almost all established critical linguists have devoted much attention to media discourses.Newspaper is one of the important mass media in our daily life.News reports not only provide readers information and pleasure,but also influence their perception,attitude and behavior.At this Information Age,people get to know a country mainly through news media.And it is believed that American news media occupy a leading position in the world.So the international news reports in American news media are crucial to influence a nation's image.That is also the reason why the American news media become a hot research topic in recent years.The thesis chooses New York Times for its prestige and studies the negative China-related reports through critically analyzing the news reports in the year of 2008 by Fairclough's three-dimensional model and Halliday's functional grammar model.It proves that there exist negative attitudes to China in New York Times.Furthermore,the thesis finds that the often-used devices which New York Times employs to express the negative attitudes can be classified into three types,namely functional approach,intertextuality and non-linguistic tools.The analysis of the samples in New York Times helps reveal the value-loaded nature of news discourse.The study also infers that linguistic structure plays a major role in the construction of ideas in the press.It is used in newspapers to form ideas and beliefs and to realize the interests of the newspaper itself. The significance of the thesis is to help the readers to increase their critical awareness of potentially biased or prejudiced language instead of accepting the news passively.After grasping the often-used devices of negative reports,the readers can get to know the real intention behind the news.