A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The Transitive Representations Of “PRAISE China” In The U.S. Broadsheets

In the information age, national image is mainly constructed by mass media. In recent years, China’s comprehensive national strength has risen significantly. However, does national image of China improve significantly in the U.S. mainstream broadsheets? Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA) unveils the hidden relationships between language, power and ideology, providing an ideal viewpoint for the study of national image of China. However, CDA is criticized for its lack of representative corpus and systematic analysis. This thesis, based on CDA and assisted by Corpus Linguistics(CL), analyzes the semantic prosody of transitive representations of “PRAISE China”. On the one hand, this thesis aims to find out how the national image of China is constructed and what discursive strategies are applied in the U.S. broadsheets, on the other hand, the research potential of combing CDA theory and CL is explored.The study is based on a special corpus of 8.8 million words of news discourse collected from New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times from September 1, 2008 to December 31, 2010. This thesis analyze the semantic preference and semantic prosody of “PRAISE China” by combing Transitivity theory to semantic prosodyThe study finds that “PRAISE China”, as a frequent collocation, can illustrate the national image of China has improved with its rise in recent years. However, in its context, the semantic prosody of “PRAISE China”, combing with transitivity, is negative, which shows that U.S. broadsheets often construct a negative national image of China by extremely complicated and subtle discursive strategies.