Analysis Of News Reports’ Effects On Ideology By Bakhtin’s Dialogue Theory

In Bakhtin’s dialogue theory, voice is a semantic concept, a synthesis signifying someone’s attitudes and thoughts. A text includes the reporter’s voice as well as others. The authorial voice and others’ voice conflict with, agree with and respond to each other in one way the other. It is through the interaction of these voices that the meaning of a text is constructed. His dialogue theory is concluded in the analysis of literature discourse, what’s more, his ideas about dialogicality is scattered in his works. So strictly speaking, his theory can by no means fall into the category of a school of general linguistics. This thesis tries to incorporate Halliday’s Systematic Functional Linguistics, Appraisal Theory with dialogue theory, which will render dialogue theory a discourse analysis tool with universal applicability, including non-literature discourse.News Reporting, as an important media in the current society, has become an important channel, sometimes the sole, for people to get to know the unknown. It is fraught with reported speeches and conflicting voices. Unbiased as it seems, it is never objective. This thesis tries to use dialogic theory and Appraisal theory to sort out different relationship between voices. Then dialogue theory and Systematic Functional Grammar are used as the analytical framework to find out the different linguistic resources signifying voices, including modality recourses, reported speeches and concessive conjunctions. Using news reports from New York Times, CNN, Xinhua.net and Global Times, which are on the same theme, this thesis tries to solve these problems. How does a reporter manipulate the reporting news to the effect that it appears to be neutral at a rough glance? How can a reader keep a critical eye and remain acutely aware in some biased reporting? Are there any differences of stance of the writers from different interest groups? It also exposes that others’ voices are manipulated by the reporter’s voice by framing and scheming the sequences of different voices. In this way, the reporter’s ideology is passed to the readers.In this paper, it is also found that China and America adopt different stances on Diaoyu Island. It is because the reporter always anticipates what is most consistent with the readers’ideology, the same as the establishement of "putative reader" in literature works.