A Comparative Study Of Attitudes In News Reports From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis is a methodology to study the public discourse on thebasis of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. It aims to uncover the relationshipbetween ideologies and power hidden in the discourse and reveal constructive effect ofdiscourse on social status, social relations and systems of beliefs and values. Due to theextent and importance, news discourse plays an important role in forming people’s ideasand attitudes. Therefore, researchers devoted to Critical Discourse Analysis turn to newsdiscourse and do a number of researches.This thesis aims to explore the implied attitudes hidden behind news reports basedon the self-built China Daily and New York Times corpus. Following the previousstudies in Critical Discourse Analysis, the research approaches the news reports at threestages, namely, description of the linguistic features, interpretation of the utterances andexplanation from the perspectives of socio-economics. Description and interpretation oftextual data on the micro-level are realized via the analysis of lexical classification,transitivity, modality and reporting verbs. On the other hand, the results will beexplained and justified by the interpretation of the social factors on a macro-level.The research findings are presented as follows：Though the news discourseembraces a variety of attitudes, most of them demonstrate, to different degrees, theideology of serving for its own profits. This overwhelming ideological implication islargely responsible for the overall negative evaluation of the news discourse in NewYork Times corpus while in China Daily the situation is the other way round. Throughdifferent picking strategies of words and discourse, China Daily and New York Timeshold different attitudes towards the Libyan issue in this period, which indicates the twonews agencies are engaged in the construction of meanings. Moreover, this study hasalso explored how and why news agencies amplify ideology-based notions by exertinginfluence on the audience through media.