Discourse Analysis Of People’s Daily News Commentary On Disasters

Our society has gradually entered the era of Risk Society, during which disastersfrequently happen regardless of human’s will. Accordingly, news media should takethe responsibility of information transmitting and public opinion leading, in order toensure the healthy and stable development of the society.Taking the People’s Daily’s commentary on the Wenchuan earthquake as casestudy, from text and context perspectives, this paper analyses the characteristics of thediscourses, shows the discourses’ transformation and finds out the causes of discoursetransformations of disaster news commentaries of People’s Daily.From the perspective of the text, the author concludes, the commentary of thePeople’s Daily on the WenChuan earthquake has the following characteristics: as forwords, it is more inclined to choose Group vocabularies; for sentences, imperative,exclamatory and rhetorical questions are quite common; as for rhetorics, antithesis,parallelisms and metaphors are used to emphasize and elevate the aesthetic value;abundant moving cases are used to illustrate specific opinions; and emotionalexpressions and logical reasonings are employed in arguments.From the perspective of context, the commentary emphasizes the constructivefunction for the society. By reasonably matching political, intellectual and publicdiscourses together,it tries to position the level,depth and emotional expressions of theessays. Besides, national, family and other moral discourses are employed to constructnational identity.With the influence of policy changes, reemphasis on the news values, theflourish of civil rights, and the internet fight for discursive powers, the discourses ofdisaster news commentary on People’s Daily have been transformed greatly, aboutwhich the political propaganda discourse decrease, and the public discourses increase.