| Critical discourse analysis( hereinafter CDA) is a discipline which is risen in English and related to discourse analysis. CDA was first proposed by Fowler in the late 1970 s. CDA advocates to carry out critical analysis for discourse, especially for the public discourse. By analyzing language features of the discourse and its social and historical backgrounds. CDA would investigate the value system hidden behind linguistic structure and further reveal the relationships between the discourse, power and ideology.English news report, as one of public discourses, dominates the public opinions and exerts subtle influences on the audience’s values and world view. Many scholars have studied the English news report, but they only study surface language features such as vocabulary,grammar, semantics, etc. Even though they carry out critical discourse analysis to news discourse, they emphasize to adopt traditional qualitative analysis method to analyze the political or military news discourses which are deeply influenced by ideology. From the perspective of CDA, this thesis adopts qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the language strategy used in the seemingly objective economic news discourse. By analysis, the author tries to explore the answers to the following question:(1) What are the differences between China Daily and The New York Times on the same stock event?(2) What are the ideological differences reflected in the news reports on stock market between China Daily and The New York Times?(3) How is the ideology realized and reinforced in the news reports on Chinese stock market between China Daily and The New York Times?Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional modal and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar, the study examines 40 news reports on Chinese stock market in China Daily and The News York Times from description, interpretation and explanation levels. The research indicates that the combination of Fairclough’s three-dimensional modal and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar can effectively conduct critical discourse analysis to seemingly objective economic news discourse. When the same economic event is reported by different media, there exist big differences in perspective and description. By virtue of language strategies such as lexical classification, transitivity, modality, news source and reporting modes, Chinese and American journalists deliberately employ the news language with implanted ideology to subtly influence readers’ understanding and judgement on the same event.The significance of the present study is embodied in theoretical and practical aspects.First, using the model of CDA to make comparative research about the economic news discourse can better reveal the underlying relationships between language, power and ideology and further expand the application scope of CDA. Second, this study helps to arouse and raise the audiences’ critical reading awareness so as to better understand the language differences and implied ideological differences among different news media. Third, this study can give some enlightenment to foreign language teachers. In the process of language teaching, teachers should try their best to cultivate and improve the students’ critical language study abilities as well as their understanding abilities. Fourth, this study can provide successful reference for the journalists. It can help journalists to deeply understand different countries’ value orientation,timely and effectively cope with the international public opinions, carefully select words to grasp the right of discourse so as to let the world understand China better. |
