Critical Discourse Analysis On Chinese Smog Related Reports In China Daily And The New York Times

Critical Discourse Analysis is a type of discourse analytic tool which is used to analyze all genres ofdiscourses, such as novels, lyrics, academic writings and mass media discourses. Nowadays, more andmore scholars and researchers pay attention to this field to reveal the interrelationship between languageand ideologies which are hidden behind language by analyzing the public discourses.This thesis carries out a critical discourse analysis of ten pieces of news reports from China Daily andThe New York Times. Both of them are on the Chinese smog in the spring of2013. In this research,Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework is adopted for discourse analysis. The present thesis falls intosix parts.Chapter one is a brief introduction of the research background, the significances of the study, researchquestions and the structure of this thesis.Chapter two is the literature review. It begins with an introduction of discourse analysis. Then thecritical discourse analysis is introduced from its theory to its methods at home and abroad. A review ofCDA’ application to news discourse analysis is followed.Chapter three explains the theoretical framework, including the Halliday’s systemic-functionalgrammar for critical discourse analysis and Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework.Chapter four presents the research questions, news data collection, and analytic tools of present study.There are two questions which the present study solved: the first one is what the differences in linguisticsfeatures between the news reports on Chinese smog in The New York Times and China Daily are; thesecond one is what the reasons for these differences in these news discourses are. The analytic tools whichthis study employed include the lexical classification, transitivity, modality, the sources and modes of thediscourse representation.Chapter five applies the theory of critical discourse analysis to analyze the selected reports, includingdata analysis and discussion. Both of the two discourses are analyzed with Fairclough’s three-dimensionalframework. At the description stage, the discourse will be analyzed with the instruments of lexicalclassification, transitivity and modality. At the interpretation stage, the discourse will be analyzed withdiscourse intertextuality, including sources and the mode of discourse. At the explanation stage, thediscourse will be analyzed in term of the politics, history, and culture.Chapter six, the last part, draws a conclusion and figures out findings, implications, and limitations of the present research. Through analysis of the discourse, the findings can be drawn that news discoursesfrom China Daily and The New York Times concerned about the Chinese smog are different. The New YorkTimes employed more severe words to describe the smog than China Daily did, which exaggerated theinfluences of Chinese smog. The New York Times only paid their attention to Chinese media, and show thatChinese media in not transparent and reliable. Besides, The New York Times used modality to show itsignorance to Chinese government, and its distrust to Chinese policies. Moreover, after surveyed theintertextuality, it is found that the New York Time neglect the influence to people without concern. WhileChina Daily not only paid attention to the event itself, but the measurement the authorities took, and citedsome authorities to show a positive appearance of China. The main reason is its differences of politics,history, culture and ideology in two countries.Thus through the critical discourse analysis in the news as a sort of adding, it can be helpful for mostreaders to improve their critical language awareness in news reading. Meanwhile, critical discourse analysisis a powerful instrument to analyze the relationship between the language and the ideology, andFairclough’s three-dimensional framework can be widely used in discourse analysis.