| Critical discourse analysis is a newly developed branch of discourse analysis, which aims to discover the relationship between language, power, and ideology through language itself from the perspectives of linguistics, sociology, and psychology.News discourse, as a type of non-literary mass media discourse, is of interest to critical discourse analysis. The most news discourse studies, however, are political news, reports on wars, strikes. There are few on natural disasters. What's more, there a number of discourses are about the overseas events instead of the native events. Therefore, this research chooses the natural disaster discourses in our country to be the samples, in hope that the existing critical news discourses can be extended. In this research, Fairclough's three-dimensional model is adopted for discourse analysis. The present thesis falls into six parts.Chapter one is a brief introduction of the research background, research questions, the significances of the present study, and the structure of this thesis.Chapter two is the literature review. It begins with an introduction of discourse analysis. Then the critical discourse analysis is introduced from its theory to its method at home and abroad. A review of CDA'application to news analysis is followed.Chapter three explains the theoretical framework, including the Halliday's systemic-functional grammar for critical discourse analysis and Fairclough's three-dimensional model.Chapter four presents the research questions, research samples, and instruments of present study. There are three questions which the present study solved: the first one is what the similarities and differences in linguistics characteristics between the media abroad and at home towards the snow storm are; the second one is what the causes of these similarities and differences in these news reports are; the third one is what the Chinese image shown in both American newspaper and Chinese newspaper is. The instruments which this study employed include the lexical choice and overlexicalization, transitivity, modality, the source and modes of the discourse representation.Chapter five applies the theory of critical discourse analysis to analyze the selected snowstorm reports, including data collection, data analysis and discussion. All the 30 pieces of discourses are analyzed with Fairclough's three-dimensional model. In the text dimension, the discourse will be analyzed with the instruments of lexical choice and overlexicalization, transitivity and modality. In the discursive practice dimension, the discourse will be analyzed with discourse representation, including source and the mode. In the social practice dimension, the discourse will be analyzed in term of the politics, history, and culture.Chapter six, the last part, draws a conclusion, figures out findings, implications, and limitations of the present research. Through analysis of the discourse, the findings can be drawn that both American media and Chinese media described the snowstorm but the American news media employed more severe words to describe the snow storm than the Chinese media did. American media not only paid their attention to the snow storm but also to the other aspects, such as the weather, resource and so on. Besides, a sense of hegemonic words is used in realizing the modality system in American newspaper reports. Moreover, after surveyed the discourse representation, the author found that the source of discourse representation in American mass media are often unnamed authorities and critics. The frequency of mode of indirect discourse in American news media is much higher than the frequency in Chinese news media. There is a frail, negative Chinese image in their media. But to the Chinese media, they reported the snow storm itself and the effective relief works, trying to mold a positive Chinese image with quick reaction and unifying effect to such terrible disaster. The source of the representation are named authorities and named critics, and much more direct discourses are employed as the secondary discourses. The frequency of direct discourse in Chinese media is much high than the frequency in American news media. The main reason is its differences of politics, history, culture and ideology in two countries.Thus through the critical discourse analysis in the news as a sort of adding, it can be helpful for most readers to improve their critical language awareness in news reading, and it can also give some inspiration to the news editors to deal with the news reports to protect our international image. Meanwhile, critical discourse analysis is a powerful instrument to analyze the relationship between the language and the ideology, and Fairclough's three-dimensional model can be widely used in discourse analysis. |
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