| Critical Discourse Analysis is aimed to reveal the ideology hidden in languagestructure and thus discover the relationship among language, power, and ideology byanalyzing the linguistic features of discourse as well as the social, cultural, andhistorical backgrounds in which the language is used. News reports, as an importantmeans of information transmission, claim to be objective and truthful, but thereporter’s opinions and standpoint are inevitably passed to the readers through newsdiscourse and exert subtle influence on the readers. Previous critical studies on newsdiscourse mainly focus on political issues, while economic news is not sufficientlystudied. Thus, it is of great significance to study economic news reports from theperspective of Critical Discourse Analysis.In2012, the topic of Sino-EU solar disputes have attracted close attention of bothChinese and Western media. The issue itself is far from a simple economic one; rather,it is complicated because political, social, cultural and other factors are involved.Therefore, the author chooses news reports on Sino-EU solar disputes to carry out astudy. Through the contrastive analysis of the linguistic features in Chinese andWestern news reports, this thesis intends to uncover the different ideologiesunderlying Chinese and Western news discourse and find its social and cultural roots.Based on Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Model and Halliday’s SystemicFunctional Grammar, the thesis selects six pieces of news reports on Sino-EU solardisputes from China Daily and The Financial Times to carry out a qualitative andquantitative study at the levels of text, discursive practice, and social practice.Correspondingly, the study is carried out at three stages: description, interpretation,and explanation. At the level of text, transitivity is adopted to analyze linguisticfeatures. At the level of discursive practice, news sources and modes of discourserepresentation are explored. And at the level of social practice, social and culturalcontexts are taken into account to explain the different ideologies hidden in news discourse.Through the analysis, it is found that Chinese and Western newspapers expresstheir different viewpoints and stances by means of different linguistic devices. Thelinguistic differences are:1) there is different focus of the elements in material, verbaland relational processes. Chinese news reports emphasize the negative impact of theEU’s anti-dumping investigation on Chinese solar companies and global photovoltaicindustry, and China’s condemnation for the EU’s “trade protectionism”, while Westernnews reports focus on the accusation of Chinese companies’ dumping practices andthe adverse effects to the European photovoltaic industry;2) in Chinese reports, alarge number of the news sources are in support of China’s standpoint, while the caseis opposite in Western news;3) in terms of modes of discourse representation, IndirectDiscourse is more frequently used in The Financial Times than in China Daily, whichmeans the Western news reports tend to be more subjective. Therefore, Economicnews reports are not entirely objective and neutral, but influenced by ideology.Meanwhile, ideology also affects the readers’ perception of the event reported throughthe language used in news discourse. One underlying reason is that news media are innature in service of governments. Besides, unequal power relation brought byconflicts of interests between China and European countries is another influentialfactor. And finally, the differences in ideology are rooted in the social and culturalbackgrounds of Chinese and Western countries. |
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