| With the purpose of revealing the ideological messages hidden within disaster news discourse, the thesis attempts to analyze contrastively two news reports on 5. 12 Wenchuan Earthquake from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis by adopting Van Dijk's Macro-Structure of News and Halliday's Systematic-Functional Grammar as theoretical framework. The two reports are selected from China Daily (CD) and New York Times (NYT) respectively.Since the birth of CDA in 1970s, public discourse including news, official reports and political speeches has always been of great interest to critical linguists. However, most of the previous researches are more or less politics-oriented, disaster news, as one important and most objective type of news, draws little attention. Hence the present study focuses on disaster news discourse in the hope of filling the gap.The thesis first reviews previous studies on disaster news reports, and then provides an introduction of the current analytic tool—Critical Discourse Analysis. Based on the theory of Macro-Structure of News and Systematic-Functional Grammar, the thesis conducts a specific comparative analysis of a pair of English disaster news reports from macro and micro level respectively. The case study of the two reports finds that disaster news discourse, like other public discourses, is ideology invested. By emphasizing different aspects of disaster reports, which is proved by analysis of different choices of macro thematic structures and micro linguistic tools, CD and NYT play different roles in realizing disaster news report's positive (knowledge, encouragement and alertness function) and negative (destructive, sensational and disintegrative function) functions.Based on the analysis, on one hand, the author's analysis proves the applicability of CDA to disaster news discourse analysis. It shows that language can never be regarded as neutral and value-free; rather it should be viewed as a social practice and embodiment of ideology. On the other hand, by revealing the effect of ideology upon language, the present study tries to provide readers with a different perspective of understanding language and a critical reading method, which helps to raise the reader's awareness of the ideology hidden in the language. Also this critical understanding of the news could help media translators to analyze the texts more thoroughly so as to achieve better translation. |
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