Image Of China’s Economy In U.S. Broadsheets From The Perspective Of Relational Processes

The thesis examines the construction of China’s economic image in a specialized corpusof U.S. broadsheets: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, publishedbetween September18,2008and December31,2010.The development of Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) has been provedfruitful, yet it also presents weakness in subjectivity and systematicness, and criticized byscholars both in and outside this field. Corpus linguistics catches much attention in UK inrecent year (henceforth CL), its practical computing techniques are supposed to do muchbenefit for CDA approach.In this study, corpus methodologies are used to manipulate the data: concordances,cluster and collocational tools are used to provide the research perspective (relationalprocesses) and main topics or issues in selected discourses. CDA theory is drawn on tointerpret the ideological significance of the findings. Based on the780000-word corpus ofAmerican news articles, the objectives of the study are designed as: first, in what ways areChina’s economic image linguistically defined and constructed; second, what are the frequenttopics of, or issues discussed in news reports relating to China’s economy; third, whatattitudes or values toward China’s economy emerging from the body of Americanmainstream newspapers.The findings show that the construction of China’s economic image is presented incongruent and metaphorical forms. The topics are mainly focused on China’s trade,investment, currency, influence and domestic market, etc. The positive and negative imagesof China’s economy show that on account of the interest, America is strengtheningcorporation with China on the one hand, and pressing China to take more responsibilities onthe other hand.The significance of this study lies in two ways. First, the applied corpus-assistedtechniques enhanced the Critical Discourse Analysis; and second this methodology is appliedto uncover ideology in the U.S. newspapers about the image of China’s economy, whichwould make important contributions to promoting the readers critical reading, government’s foreign policy establishment and Sino-U.S. relationships.