| Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a socially-oriented application of linguistic analysis, which employs the concepts and methods concerned with the systemic functional linguistics developed by M.A.K. Halliday. It is intended to make clear the relationships between language and its social conditions, especially the relationship between language and ideology, which has frequently been taken for granted as common sense by people. CDA intends to explore those connections by means of linguistic analysis so as to help readers realize the ideologies hidden in the language and avoid accepting them passively or uncritically.As a high-profile sporting event, the Olympic Games has attracted the news reports from various countries. Among these reports, various attitudes and ideologies are embedded. However, most of the studies concentrate on the comparative critical analysis of news reports in the political, economic, and social fields. Several focus on the analyses of stylistics and language features of editorials from the news reports. Up to now, with regard to the2012London Olympic Games, few news reports have been conducted an in-depth study. This thesis conducts a comparative critical discourse analysis of the2012London Olympic related news in People’s Daily and The New York Times by adopting Fairclough’s three dimensional model of CDA as the basic theoretical framework and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as the analytical tool so as to testify whether ideological meanings and power relations can be implied in seemingly objective and neutral sporting news discourse and to explore how language is employed by news producers and how ideological implications come into being. It aims to promote readers’critical sensibility and awareness when they read news so as to strengthen the anti-control awareness of public discourses.At the level of text, the linguistic features are described under the headings of lexical classification and transitivity system in the stage of description. At the level of discursive practice, the modes of reporting practice and the news sources are studied in the stage of interpretation. At the level of social practice, the thesis investigates the institutional context, situational context and sociocultural context in which the news data with ideological meanings are produced.Through a comparative analysis of news coverage in the two newspapers, 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 the Olympic-related news reports. 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. |
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