| Modern society has witnessed the increasingly important and indispensable role of mass media in daily life. The mass media, especially those in English, are penetrating into all walks of life. As an important form of communication transmission, newspapers and magazines lure people into consuming them as a fixed part of their daily routine. For the majority of people, reading periodicals makes up their one of the most substantial and indispensable day-to-day activities. International political news reports (IPNR) are playing such a significant role in both dominating the worldwide opinion and manipulating people's ideologies, that in some sense, news reports are endowed with the mission of teaching people how to regard or even how to perceive the world. IPNR serves the source of international information, mouthpiece of domain ideologies, as well as the shaper of people's thoughts, behaviors and perceptions.However, the ideology loaded in IPNR is usually characterized of the opacity and obscurity. As a result, news reports may seem objective and just on page, but convey diverse ideological implication beyond people's notice. Thanks to these characteristics, political news reports deserve the particular focus from critical discourse analysis (CDA). As a newly emerging sub-discipline of linguistics, CDA has been drawing more and more concerns from scholars recent years. Discourse analysis in the past is mainly constructive while CDA is critical, with the aim to unveil the implicit relationship between language and ideology and the way in which ruling classes take advantage of language to shape readers'ideologies in order to safeguard the dominant privilege and the existing social system.CDA commonly takes media discourses, such as news discourses, political speeches and official documents as the main objects of studies. In the previous researches, few have been conducted on English news headlines. People tend to take the headline as the"window"of the news report, which indicates the importance of the headline in the news report. Especially in the modern society, a world stressing the efficiency, the importance of news headline becomes even more obvious. Totally different effects will be produced if different reporters generalize the identical political event with different titles. It is a tentative conduction to explore the linguistic representation of ideological elements in English news headlines from the perspective of CDA. At the same time, it is expected to shed some light on the cultivation of critical awareness in language reading, teaching and translating.The thesis is made up of four chapters. Chapter one is the literature review of the studies on CDA both abroad and at home. A retrospection dealing with the development and achievements of CDA in general is conducted. Chapter two briefly introduces the theory framework of CDA. It gives a general explanation to the philosophical and linguistic foundations and some key concepts in CDA. Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Model (TDM) as well as Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG) is explicated respectively in particular. Chapter three is devoted to the contrastive cases analyses of English news headlines mainly on IPNR with Halliday's SFG as the analytic tool and Fairclough's TDM as the reference framework from the perspective of CDA. Samples are discussed in terms of lexical classification, transitivity, transformation (nominalization and passivization), modality and intertextuality by a combination of qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis. Chapter four is the implication of findings drawn from the previous study. It highlights the practical significance of the cultivation of English learners'critical awareness and critical reading ability, so that they cannot be controlled or misled by the neutral language on the surface. The study also intends to shed some light on the practical translation of IPNR. |
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