A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And Western English News Reports On 2015 China Victory Day Parade

As a primary means in mass media,news plays an important role in disseminating information.When presenting the event,news conveys the ideology of a certain society so as to exert influence on people’s views and attitudes.Critical discourse analysis aims to unveil the ideology embedded in the discourses.However,it often encounters criticism due to the subjectivity in interpretation and conclusion.The quantitative analytical method of corpus linguistics makes the corpus-based news study available.This thesis will work through the news discourse collected from China Daily and British and American mainstream newspapers on 2015 China Victory Day Parade as corpus data so as to sort out the different focuses of Chinese and Western news reports on the same event,as well as the reasons.In order to build two corpora,the author picks English news reports on 2015 China Victory Day Parade from China Daily and British and American mainstream newspapers such as The New York Times,Washington Post,USA Today,The Times,The Guardian,etc.This study adopts Fairclough’s Three-dimensional model as analytical framework and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as analytical tools.To begin with,AntConc 3,4.3w(Windows)2014 is used for word frequency analysis and keywords analysis.Then,from the discursive practice,the researcher tried to unveil the discourse production.Finally,in social practice level,in order to find the reasons that account for the different ideologies,the social contexts are investigated in terms of culture,politics and military.The study shows that there are sharp differences of the high-frequency words and key words found out in two corpora.Chinese reports put much emphasis on the military parade itself.It highlights the theme of the parade—remember history,cherish the memory of China’s revolutionary martyrs,uphold peace and create the future.In China,the military parade is reported in a positive light,which conveys a message to the world that China is a peace-loving country.However,Western media hold the view that China is deliberately showing off its power by holding the military parade.Western media only simply mention Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.Instead of reporting the parade itself,Western media show more interest in other issues in China such as territory disputes,Taiwan question as well as the question that which party played a decisive role in Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression.