Critical Discourse Analysis Of The News Reports On The Marine Conflicts Between China And Vietnam

News discourse directly or indirectly manipulates and plays a crucial part in shaping people’s attitudes and opinions towards the news event.In terms of news discourse’s function of spreading ideologies,the study on its objectivity is theoretically and realistically significant. This thesis holds that news report is not objective and is intervened by the ideology and national interests.Based on the framework of Halliday’s systematic functional grammar and the application of the critical analytic tools, combined with quantitative and qualitative methods, this thesis conducts a comparative analysis of news discourse from Vietnamese News Agency (VNA) and China Daily on the same event of marine territory disputes between Vietnam and China in an aim to explore the differences and embedded ideologies.This thesis selects30samples from VNA and30from China Daily. The news reports selected are published in May and June of2014when the marine conflicts rise densely and fiercely. The reports are retrieved from the authoritative websites of the two news agencies.Sharp contrasts between the reports of the two news agencies have been found from the perspective of classification, transitivity, news sources, reporting modes, and transformation. On lexical classification, the two news agencies describe the same object in distinctive ways.From the perspective of transitivity, in material process, the same actors are collocated with distinct process verbs and goals even for the same events reported. The similar difference also lies in the relational process. The same carrier or the identified is attributed with distinct attributes or identifier. On the perspective of news sources, the two news agencies display what the famous public figure or the government official of the country has claimed, and, the choice of which part to be chosen and whose voice to be heard are distinct. As for reporting modes, the reporting verb is an important element in disclosing the implied ideologies. A thorough review of the60samples, the reporting verbs can be classified into three levels. By combining different levels of reporting verbs with different content, the VNA and China Daily have realized each different purpose. As for transformation, both VNA and China Daily have employed nominalization and passivization.However, for the same object, it is nominalized distinctively in VNA and China Daily and for the same nominalization product, it represents different actions. When it comes to passivazation, what to be passivized and how to passivize are completely different. Based on these sharp contrasts, conclusions can be made that news report is by no means neutral and objective and language and ideology are mutually influenced. In order not to be affected or misled by the hidden ideologies, readers should raise their critical awareness towards news discourse.Guided by Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, critical discourse analysis is mature and efficient in disclosing the implied ideologies and power relations in news reports.Based on the accumulation of the invaluable analytical theories and methods in previous studies, this thesis explores the linguistic strategies of news reports from VNA and China Daily on the marine conflicts and a series of following events caused by the conflicts to reveal the power and bias that are initiated and developed under a certain social and cultural context, and in hope to raise the critical language awareness in news reading.