| Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a mode of discourse study, proposed and developedby western scholars represented by British linguist Fowler in the late1970s. It integrates suchseveral disciplines as linguistics, sociology, psychology, ethnography and the mass media, etc.and forms a perspective of theorizing in modern linguistics, getting its own development.CDA is concerned with the inequality and bias of linguistic phenomenon in social reality,aiming to find out the nature of language so as to disclose the relation between language andthe embedded ideology through analyzing the surface linguistic structure. Since CDA believesthat discourse is a form of social action, what it deals with is not only linguistic level, but thetext in social practice. CDA exclusively focuses on many areas including news reports,political speech and official legal documents etc., among which public discourse is oneimportant area. Political news reports are characterized with politics, subject to the controllers,and influenced by their ideology. Through analyzing language in political news, CDA couldexpose the influence of ideology embedded in news discourse, and its control to the society.This thesis involves three research questions:(1) What ideologies are embedded inpolitical news of VOA and CNN?(2) How do VOA and CNN exercise the context control?(3)How does the audience resist such control? The three questions are independent respectivelybut closely related. With three questions proposed at first, the present study based onFairclough’s three-dimensional model applies Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as theanalytic tools, and makes a contrastive analysis of six news reports selected from VOA andCNN respectively, adopting both quantitative and qualitative methods. This thesis mainly analyzes transitivity at ideational meta-function level, modality at interpersonal meta-functionlevel, and thematic choice at textual meta-function level. While analyzing the linguisticfeatures, it also pays attention to relating the event with its social context. Through a series ofcontrastive analysis, the relation between language and ideology is further disclosed.Concerning three topics, three VOA political news reports and another three CNNpolitical news reports are selected in the study. A series of contrastive analysis shows thatlinguistic expressions, implied meanings and embedded ideologies are different in VOA andCNN news: transitivity at ideational function level mainly involves relational, material,mental and verbal process among six processes; modality at interpersonal function level isrealized by the use of modal verbs and modal adjuncts; and textual function will focus theanalysis on thematic choice. It is found that in political news reports, VOA is more concernedwith those of being, while CNN is more concerned with those of doing; compared with CNN,the use of more modality in VOA news makes VOA less objective and persuasive; and VOAshows a comparatively strong power position of government, while CNN gives powerposition to the public. With the explanation of CDA and the critical analysis of selectedsamples, the thesis further analyzes and discloses ideologies hidden in political news reportsthat control news discourse, aiming to cultivate the audience’s critical reading ability, makethem more sensitive to embedded ideologies, and improve their ability of linguistic analysisand judgment. |
PDF Full Text Request