| The present research analyzes the language use and implied ideologies in reports of Chinese-Americans in New York Times from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Dating from 1970s, CDA aims at critically exploring the ideology of a given society through language used in discourses. In the past forty years, many researchers have applied CDA to analyze news discourses. However, these researches tended to cover the same event from a synchronic perspective. In addition, data used in quantitative analysis were collected through manual counting by researchers themselves, which, thus, limited the size of researching samples only to small ones and worse still made the statistical data less accurate. Compared with previous studies, the present study, with the help of Antconc 3.2, applies CDA to analyze reports of about 25000 words on Chinese-Americans in New York Times in the period of 1981-1983 and 2006-2008. The present research aims to explore portrayals and attitudinal changes of Chinese-Americans in the above-mentioned two periods from a diachronic perspective. To do so, the present research analyzed the selected discourses by using Fairclough's three-dimensional model and linguistic tools such as lexical classification, transitivity and modality provided by SFG.The present research is composed of six chapters. Chapter one provides the background, research objectives, research significances and definitions of the terms. Chapter two reviews Chinese-Americans, previous studies on CDA and application of CDA to news discourses. Chapter three introduces the theoretical framework, that is, Fairclough's three-dimensional model, Halliday's systemic-functional grammar and the relationship between them. Chapter four is about the research design including research questions, research samples, research instruments and data collection. Chapter five presents discourse analysis and discussion. Specifically speaking, the discourses were analyzed with the instruments of lexical classification, transitivity and modality by the help of Antconc 3.2 at the describing stage. At the interpreting stage, the discourses were analyzed by news sources and reporting modes in intertextulity with the help of Antconc 3.2. At the explaining stage, on the basis of the above two stage, the choices of linguistic tools in the discourse were analyzed from social, historical, cultural, and political perspectives, meanwhile the ideological meanings implied by the linguistic tools were unveiled. Chapter six concludes the findings, which are shown as follows:(1) There was implied ideology in the reports of two periods even though the two periods tried to report Chinese-Americans authentically; (2) Implied ideology in the reports, which reflects Americans'attitudes towards Chinese-Americans, has experienced changes from Period 1 to Period 2, namely from a negative attitude to a neutral attitude, from a distorting attitude to frank attitude, from a accusing voice to a less accusing voice, from subjective to objective and from a narrow to a wide perspective.The findings indicate the changes of American ideology during the past 30 years, and it's the ideology changes that produce Americans'attitudinal changes towards Chinese-Americans.Some useful implications obtained from this study include that Antconc 3.2 as a free statistical tool can be of great use for researchers to investigate samples of large size from the perspective of CDA; that the readers should read news reports critically rather than take them as truth; that teachers should instruct their students the existence of implied ideology in news reports so as to build up students'ability of critical reading. |
PDF Full Text Request