A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Japan Earthquake In China Daily And The New York Times

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which emerged in the1970s, has undergone a rapid development in the recent decades and has been applied to the analysis of discourse belonging to various genres, non-literary as well as literary. Nowadays, public discourse, especially media discourse, has been frequently analyzed in order to demonstrate the subjectivity and partiality of news discourse by unveiling the attitudes, stances and puiposes of the writers in producing the news texts. In this thesis, four sample news reports on the Japan earthquake in2011from China Daily and The New York Times are selected for analysis so as to testify whether ideological meanings and power relations can be implied in seemingly objective and neutral disaster news discourse and to explore how language is employed by news producers and how ideological implications come into being.Based on our understanding of critical discourse analysis mentioned above, this thesis is intended to make a contrastive critical analysis of the four news reports using Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as the analytic framework and M.A.K. Halliday’s systemic functional grammar as the analytic tool. The analysis is conducted from four aspects, namely, classification (lexical choice), modality (tense, direct and indirect speech reporting, and vague language), transitivity (material process, verbal process, relational process), and transformation (nominalization and passivization).From the critical analysis of the four sample news reports, we can come to the following conclusions. First, news reporters usually employ words with exaggerated meanings to express their opinions on a certain event. Second, as to modality, tenses, direct and indirect speech reporting, and vague language are deliberately reorganized and used to convey the journalists’intentions and attitudes toward the reported events as well as the views and standpoints of the power groups they represent. Third, in transitivity system, there is a dominance of material, verbal, and relational processes. A small or even no proportion is held by the behavioral, mental, and existential processes. Fourth, American reporters are more likely to employ nominalization and passivization in the transformation system than their Chinese counterparts. By deleting, substituting, combing, and reordering a system of its elements, they manage to declare the standpoints of the power groups they represent. Through the contrastive critical analysis of the four news reports on the Japan earthquake in2011from China Daily and The New York Times, we conclude that the combination of Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar is regarded as an effective and applicable way to analyze disaster discourse. News producers skillfully make use of various linguistic resources to express, often in a very implicit way, their own views and standpoints regarding a certain event as well as those of the parties involved in that event.