A Corpus-based Critical Analysis Of Chinese And American Economic Discourses

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is to investigate the ideological meaning behind language structure through analyzing the language and its social context of the discourse, with which it aims to explore the complex relations among language, power and ideology. A combination of CDA and corpus linguistics technology could provide researches with qualitative and quantitative analysis. This study employs corpus linguistics methodology under the theoretical framework of CDA to deliver a critical analysis on different usages of keywords in the same register in Chinese and American economic discourses.In this study, two specialized corpora are built. One is a collection of China Economist (2008-2010), a bimonthly economical academic journal, published by the Institute of Industrial Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; the other is a collection of The American Economist, a semiyearly published by the International Honor Society in Economics. This study employs the corpus tool WordSmith Tools 5.0 to investigate the differences on keywords, key key-words in the two corpora, and perform concordance analyses on DOMESTIC, FOREIGN, INTERNATIONAL and GLOBAL, which lead to a comparative analysis on semantic preference and discourse prosody that Chinese and American economists present about their economic relations to the world.The following conclusions can be drawn from this study:1 A stronger sense of national boundaries is found in China Economist than that in The American Economist.2 Chinese economists frequently use positive words to take a more active and confirmative display of its efforts and achievements, while American economists always illustrate the facts neutrally with its essence.3 In Chinese economists'view, China is playing more as a participant and learner in international economic environment; America, in American economists'view, is acting as an organizer and intercessor in it...