A Study Of China’s National Image In The 2015 New York Times From The Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

The national image is the projection of a country’s objective state in public opinion.Shaping the national image is closely related to the reports,especially international reports,of news media.Whether the reports are objective and fair or not have a direct impact on public’s opinion about the relevant news events and on public’s impression of the country involved.However,the language in news reports,as a carrier of information dissemination,often implies the opinions and attitudes of the media.And analyzing the language in news reports is of great significance to understand reporters’ intents,to uncover the truth of events,to have an objective view of related countries,etc..Critical discourse analysis is an approach to analyzing language which aims to reveal the ideological stances and power relationship embedded in the linguistic structures.Fairclough’s three-dimensional model is one of the outstanding representatives of critical discourse analysis.Fairclough takes Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as the discourse analysis method and clarifies both the dialectical relationship between language and society and the role of ideology in discourse.Therefore,from the perspective of critical discourse analysis and based on the 338 China-related reports in the 2015 New York Times,this thesis takes Fairclough’s three-dimensional model as the theoretical framework and Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as the analytical tool,sorts out those reports into four aspects of politics,economy,society and culture,adopts the method of integrating point with face,and analyzes those reports at three levels: description level,interpretation level and explanation level.At description level,the linguistic features of the reports are analyzed from three perspectives of lexical classification,transitivity,and modality.At interpretation level,the ways the reports produced and explained in social context are analyzed from two perspectives of reporting mode and news source.At explanation level,the reports are analyzed in historical and sociocultural context.Through the analysis above this thesis intends to find out the specific national image of China shaped by this newspaper.The study shows that news reporters use lots of linguistic and reporting techniques to guide readers to form negative national image of China,and through reading those reports readers tend to believe China is a country that is ambitious in political field and extremely wealthy in economic field,a country that problems continuously emerge in social field,and a country that is eager to show itself in cultural field.Besides,this thesis finds that news reports are driven by reporters’ ideology and cannot be completely objective,and China’s national image shaped by those reports is distorted to some extent.Moreover,this thesis believes that critical discourse analysis is instructive to English teaching and learning,and Chinese media can get inspiration from the language and reporting skills used by the New York Times.