| Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), arising in 1970s, is an approach of discourse analysis aimed to reveal social problems. It focuses on the relationship between discourse, power and ideology, or to be more specific, on revealing the hidden ideological significance in the discourse through examining its language features and the wider social context they are produced in, thus revealing the mutual influence between ideology and discourse construction. As a typical kind of public discourse, news discourse is always the focus of CDA studies. But the previous researches largely concern those news reports with explicit ideology such as political, economic, cultural and military news, and few people pay attention to the sports news discourse which is assumed to be objective and neutral. In this study, the rarely explored discourse is chosen to provide the language data under research. Within the framework of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), a contrastive critical analysis is conducted of Chinese, South Korean and American reports on Kim Yu-na’s winning the silver in the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Through this analysis, the study aims to expose the ideology invested in the sports news discourse and how the reporter consciously reproduces and reconstructs it with language forms and structures.The news reports are collected from Chosun Ilbo, The New York Times and China Daily, the three most representative national newspapers respectively for South Korea, America and China. To cover the follow-up reports, the anthor has gathered the related news in the two months after the match, resulting to eleven pieces from Chosun Ilbo, seven from The New York Times and four from China Daily. The data are analyzed at three levels:text, discourse practice and social practice. At textual level, a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data is conducted from the perspective of lexical classification and transitivity system, which are two analytical tools in Halliday’s SFG. At the level of discourse practice, the production process of the news discourse is examined in terms of the mode of discourse representation and news source. At the level of social practice, the differences between the three newspapers at the previous two levels are explained from social, cultural and historical perspectives and thus the hidden ideological significance is revealed.It is found that the reports in Chosun Ilbo show a strong subjective tendency, characterizing Kim in an entirely positive manner but keeping an extremely negative attitude towards the judging result. By contrast, those from The New York Times and China Daily are more objective and impartial, conforming to the basic rules of news reporting. But they are slightly different from each other in reporting style and stance. The New York Times tends to analyze the problem in a rational way and be bold and sharp in voicing its own opinions using words with direct and specific meaning while China Daily is relatively vague in attitude without clarifying its own stance and uses words that are more moderate and unspecific in meaning. The differences in representation mentioned above show that the three newspapers actually provide their own interpretations and perceptions of the same news event from their particular perspectives and ideologies. The standpoint held by Chosun Ilbo reflects the excessive nationalism of the Korean. Owing to the strong desire to have their "small and weak" country recognized, they are quite exclusive and insular in viewing and judging others. The differences between The New York Times and China Daily in reporting may be traced back to the differences between America and China in culture and values. To be more specific, America attaches great importance to democracy and individual freedom while China values more collectivism and social harmony.The findings reveal that even the seemingly most neutral sports news discourse may also be ideologically influenced. Theoretically, the research result not only demonstrates CDA as an effective tool for the analysis of the relationship between language and ideology, but also the wide applicability of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s SFG to news discourse studies. Besides, it has some practical significance in helping improve people’s critical awareness in reading and cultivate their critical thinking ability. In this sense, it also provides some implications for second or foreign language teaching. |
PDF Full Text Request