A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports From The New York Times And China Daily

Critical discourse analysis (CDA), or critical linguistics, emerging in1970s, is a discipline of discourse analysis method. Its major linguistic foundation is Halliday’s systemic functional grammar (SFG), aiming to explore the concealed relationship among language, power and ideology. Language and ideology are closely linked with each other. Language is an important way to study or examine ideology, and language form can be explained through ideology analysis.CDA pays special attention to mass media discourse. Nowadays, the development of the mass media has accelerated the spread of the culture products and deepened the influence of ideology. News report is an important study object of media discourse. News report is regarded as a kind of social practice, and news discourse becomes the product of this practice. Like other types of discourse, it implies or represents the producer’s stand and views, influencing people’s ideology. As a result, dissimilarity can be observed when the same issue is presented in different media.News reports in pairs from The New York Times and China Daily are selected as the study material. A contrastive study is conducted by the application of Fairclough’s CDA mode and Halliday’s transitivity system, and followed by further statistics and interpretation of the results, revealing the difference of hidden ideology behind language and the impact on linguistic strategies in media discourse by different ideology. And thus, it serves to demonstrate CDA’s function and helps to raise people’s awareness of critical reading.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces the research background, study significance and the thesis layout. Chapter Two is the literature review, i.e. the study of CDA and its application to the media discourse both abroad and at home. Chapter Three presents the theoretical basis, including Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s SFG, in particular, transitivity system. Chapter Four is the sample analysis from the perspective of CDA. Chapter Five is the conclusion part with major findings, limitations and implications.