| With the great influence of English around the world, English language and the culture it conveys spread to every corner of the world with the expansion of British and American countries, affecting all aspects of the political, social, and economic life. This culture "hegemony" is increasingly becoming obvious and much English news which are seemingly objective and fair in fact hide an ideology and give a subtle influence to readers.In the development of the language research over the past few decades, studying the relationship between language and ideology from a critical perspective developed, but most CDA studies take political news and economic news as texts. Other news genres, such as sports news, entertainment news, disaster news and war news are rarely examined. By analyzing war news reports about Syria War, it is intended to reveal how the US media produce reports on the conflicts and the ideologies of the powerful group are concealed under the news discourse through language use. This paper complete the research purpose through two questions:1) What is the ideology concealed in American news reports during the Syria War?2) How is it realized in ANR? In order to answer the two questions, all the data are collected from the main websites like:www.whitehouse, and a small-scale corpus is built. Then this paper adopts Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as the theoretical foundation, takes Van Dijik’s Socio-Cognitive theory of Positive us and Negative them as well as Fairclough’s Three-dimensional model as the theoretical framework, exploring the relationship between language and ideology from the lexical and textual level.This paper’s main body can be divided into two parts. Firstly, in the research methods and design, all the selected data is raw material, which is annotated by Tree-tagger and analyzed by using software like Wordsmith and Excel. Secondly, based on the analysis of corpus, the author carries on the quantitative analysis from lexical level, mainly by word frequency statistics, providing an overview of the Syria war. In qualitative analysis level, Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar and Van Djik’s "Negative Them and Positive Us" theory are combined to examine how the ideologies can be realized in social practice under the war background. Results and discussions show that1). In the Syria War, different linguistic patterns used by the spokesman:the positive image of U.S as "savior", the negative image of Syria’s former leader Assad as "dictator", in the Syria War, the participation of the U.S is just for justice and democracy.3). The different images are realized by linguistic patterns:the negative image of Assad as "dictator" is realized through frequent use of material process, relational process and the modal verb "should"; the positive image of the U.S as "savior" is created by the frequent use of transitivity, personal pronoun "we"; the victim image of Syrians is mainly built by lexical classification, mental process and modal verb "will" and passivazation.3) The ideology embedded in ANR deep roots in its social contexts. In the language image, spokesman in "US" try to conceal the real purpose of war and aggression.Based on the analysis, on one hand, the author’s analysis proves the applicability of CDA to disaster news discourse analysis. It shows that language can never be regarded as neutral and value-free, rather it should be viewed as a social practice and embodiment of ideology. On the other hand, by revealing the effect of ideology upon language, the present study tries to provide readers with a different perspective of understanding language and a critical reading method, which helps to raise the reader’s awareness of the ideology hidden in the language and increase their judgment when reading English news. |
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