Intertextuality Of English News Discourse:a Critical Approach

News is a representation of the world in language, and with all the stated facts and quotations from reliable sources, the language that news reporters use is generally regarded as objective and neutral. Critical linguists, however, disagree by proposing that the language we use is unexceptionally affected by the way we think, and that language, in turn, can have impact on society and people’s minds with certain structures and meanings. In critical discourse analysis (CDA), the concept of intertextuality is introduced into the analytical framework to mediate the connection between language and social context. However, works in CDA so far are largely focused on the traditional linguistic analysis of the surface structure of news, while intertextuality is less discussed in analyzing news discourse.Based on the three-dimensional framework proposed by Fairclough, and by conducting a thorough investigation of the manifest and constitutive intertextuality of a series of news articles, this thesis tries to treat news reports as dynamic discourse, which absorbs and is produced out of various other previous texts and therefore explains the productivity of texts. Furthermore, by associating language features with specific background information, this thesis provides readers with a critical perspective in interpreting news reports in relation to social and political contexts. The language data for analysis is collected from48news articles from China Daily and New York Times, all of which themed on the2011Libyan Crisis following a similar timeline. By examining the discourse representation, genre and style in these articles and according to the statistics acquired from them, the study finds that (1) intertextuality is a major source for the production of news articles;(2) news reports dominantly represent voices from the authoritative and the powerful, and comparatively quite weak in quoting from the general, ordinary public;(3) differences in language use between the two newspapers display a divergence in their viewpoints and political stances.