A CDA Study Of Discourse Hegemony In The New York Times’ Business Reports About China’s Restrictions On Rare Earth Export

The thesis attempts to explore the discourse hegemony encoded in The New YorkTimes’ business reports concerning China’s restrictions on rare earth export. On thebasis of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, this study follows the three steps:description of linguistic features in terms of nominalization, metaphor of modality,speech reporting and false pragmatic presupposition, interpretation of hegemonicdiscourses and explanation of social reasons. Through these three steps, the studyaims to demonstrate the relationship between language and power, that is, themanipulating power of language on the society and on public’s opinion concerningcertain events, and also the influence of ideology on the use of linguistic resources.After examining12samples of The New York Times’ business reports aboutChina’s rare earth export restriction, the author comes to find out the following facts:1) in spite of the fact that news reports are always claimed to be objective andimpartial, ideological thoughts, including discourse hegemony, are embodied in newsdiscourses;2) by taking advantage of the linguistic resources like nominalization,metaphor of modality, speech reporting and false pragmatic presupposition, reportersencode biased hegemonic discourses in the business reports so skillfully that readersmight just accept them as solid facts without a second thought;3) the purpose ofimplanting hegemonic discourses in these reports is for the manipulation of thereaders’ attitudes towards the issue of China’s restrictions on rare earth export. Andmore importantly, through the influence of mass media, the discourse hegemonyembedded in the reports are intended to force Chinese government to givereconsideration on their policy of rare earth export restriction;4) the socialmotivations for discourse hegemony derive from the ambitions of western countries tomaximize their economic as well as political benefits. The research has both theoretical and practical significance. Theoreticallyspeaking, this thesis not only contributes to broadening the research scope of CDA,but also helps to enrich the analytical devices of CDA. Practically speaking, theunveiling of discourse hegemony encoded in The New York Times is conductive toalerting readers to be vigilant against ideology penetration in reading newspapers.It is hoped that the present study could on one hand provide implications fornews analysis, and on the other hand help to improve the readers’ critical awareness inreading news discourses.