A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports Of Copenhagen Climate Conference From The New York Times

From critical discourse analysis perspective, primarily based on the theoreticalframework of Fairclough‘s perspective on the interaction between language and societyand van Dijk‘s social-cognitive approach coupled with the fundamental principle of―choice‖in systemic functional linguistics, this dissertation focuses on whether theinequality problem exists or not in the reports of Copenhagen climate conference aboutChina from the website of the New York Times.18reports concerning China from November20to December20in2009areselected as data from the NYT and2other reports from The Times are used forcomparison.The study is carried out at three levels, namely the choice of words, the choice ofsentence structures and the choice of overall structures.The analysis reveals that inequality problem does not only exist, but it also is alsorealized in various subtle ways, including over-lexicalization, naming, normalization,presupposition, parallel structure, the level of specificity and incompleteness, themodification to reported speech, the choice of source of news, variation of genre andthe choice of visual mode. The use of these devices in achieving inequality reportinghelps to reproduce ideology in the readers‘minds and in turn influences the change thesocial practice in favor of America and finally blame China for the disappointing dealof the climate conference. These devices function mainly through the positiveself-presentation and negative other-presentation.The study also shows that new approaches of achieving inequality are employed,which are the equality-for-all presentation and positive other-presentation, whichfunction through the emphasis of the similarities between China and America and theemphasis of China‘s strong economy with an attempt to impose more responsibility onChina in order to shrug off its own responsibility.The study also discovers that ideology is related to what is chosen to be madeprominent and to be the focus of attention in the discursive production, transmission andconsumption.