A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Reports On Zhouqu County’s Mudslide

Critical discourse analysis is a newly-developed aspect of discourse analysis,with the purpose to reveal the relationship between power, language, and ideologythrough analyzing language from the angles of linguistics, sociology, and psychology.News discourse is quite interesting to critical discourse analysis. However, peopleusually analyze political news on economy, strikes or speeches of leaders. It seemsthat natural disaster is not as interesting as others. So recently, people began to payattention to the natural disaster. In the past, people only focus on the overseas event;recently they began to talk about the home event. Based on the above two points, thisresearch chooses the natural disaster discourses in China as the samples, hoping thatthe existing critical news discourses can be extended. In this research, Fairclough’sthree-dimensional model is used for discourse analysis.This study aims to answer the following questions:(1) what are the linguisticssimilarities and differences between the America media and Chinese media towardsthe same news?(2) What causes these similarities and differences in the news reportsdiscourses?(3) What and how are the Chinese images shown in American newspapersand Chinese newspapers?There are16samples from4newspapers at home and abroad. This thesis adoptsFairclough’s three dimensional model as its framework and Halliday’s systematicfunctional Grammar as its analytic tools.Some major findings are as follows:1).Both the two countries are concerned about the disaster, but the USA media ismore concerned about the influence and result of the natural disaster while China paidmore attention to the relief work.2).The two countries carry quite different ideology and have completely differentsociety institutions, so the language is shaped or modeled by the social ideology and institutions.3). USA media showed the world a fragile and negative Chinese image, yet theChinese media indicated the world a positive and optimistic Chinese image. Therefore,it can be concluded that the language plays a vital part in building the media’s viewsand shapes a representation of the world in news discourses.This study is a supplement to the existing CDA studies with the purpose ofhelping the readers and learners to cultivate and develop critical language awarenessand employ critical reading when they acquire information. Thus through the criticaldiscourse analysis in the news as a sort of adding, it can be helpful for most readers toimprove their critical language awareness in news reading, and it can also give someinspiration to the news editors to deal with the news reports to protect ourinternational image. Meanwhile, critical discourse analysis is a powerful instrument toanalyze the relationship between the language and the ideology, and Fairclough’sthree-dimensional model can be widely used in discourse analysis.