Analyzing Editorials From The Perspective Of CDA

Put forth by Fowler and his colleagues in 1979, Critical Linguistic (also called Critical Discourse Analysis) has been developing fast in the past three decades. A large number of journalistic articles and academic papers have emerged, applying different approaches of critical discourse analysis to the researches in various fields, representing a promising prospect. The purpose of Critical Discourse Analysis (hereafter initiated as CDA) is to investigate the relations between discourse, power, dominance and inequality, seeking to reveal the underlying ideology and power relations hidden in discourse, and meanwhile to examine the constructive effect of discourse upon social status, social relations and systems of belief and value.As an inseparable part of our daily life, media become more and more important in every respect, becoming an invisible way of influencing and dominating human ideologies by using different linguistic devices, which catches the eyes of many CDA researchers. Thus, a large number of researches with news discourse as the main subject have emerged prominently. This thesis, drawing on Fairclough's three-dimensional model as the theoretical framework, Systemic-functional devices and appraisal theory as the main analytical tools, will analyze eight selected editorials from the New York Times on the topic of London Bombings in 2005 in textual, intertextual and socio-contextual levels. In the process of analysis, the present study is progressed with the analysis of representation exploring how the editorial writers are positioned themselves with the event of London Bombings, then leading to a detailed discussion of what linguistic devices are employed when representing social actors and the event, and how textual and intextual features are produced to transmit ideology and their attitude, and how the contextual factors are related with the production of textual and intertextual features.