A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Chinese, American, Japanese News Reports Of Diaoyu Islands

Critical Discourse Analysis is an important tool of discourse analysis; it is used toanalyze ideology concealed in discourses which is usually taken for granted by readers.The aim is to seek the relationships among language, power and ideology. The ideologyand power are reflected in discourses; in turn discourses have helped to strengthen thehidden ideology and power.In modern societies, news report is still one of the most important ways that peopleobtain information. It has a significant effect on how people understand and think aboutthe world. So, news report can strongly influence and manipulate social cognitionthrough different ideologies embedded in language.The paper illustrates a critical analysis of six Chinese, American, and JapaneseNews Reports of Diaoyu Islands from the perspective of Ideational function,Interpersonal function and Textual function of Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar,also the explanation stage of Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Framework. Then,describes research methods and interprets analysis process of news report in CDA, inorder to explore the way how the language producer use language to transport his or herideology to others and the way the power is realized. The study also confirms that CDAcan help better understand news report, provides us theory foundation and researchmethod.The following conclusions are made through study: news discourse is not impartialand objective, the choice of language form and discourse structure is a kind of hybridproduct of specific ideology and social structure. The findings of the study reveal thatthere are great differences among the representations of Diaoyu Islands Incident in thethree newspapers. Investigate its reasons, different political systems, different historicbackgrounds and different ideologies of the three countries can be the explanations.This paper consists of five chapters: Chapter one gives a brief introduction to the background of the research, the purpose and significance of the research; Chapter twopresents the literature review and gives detailed elaboration about the birth anddevelopment of CDA at home and abroad; Chapter three introduces the theory ofHalliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar and explanation stage of Fairclough’sThree-Dimensional Framework. Chapter four focuses on the critical discourse analysisof sample news reports of Diaoyu Islands and discusses the implications of the findings;Chapter five draws a conclusion, concentrates on the research results and gives adiscussion of the research findings and recommendations for the future research.