| Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA)is a new branch of discourse analysis.Since it was firstly put forward in 1970 s,it has gained a rapid development both at home and abroad.It is usually adopted by scholars to analyze news discourse with the intention to reveal relations among discourse,power and ideology.Topics in news discourse are various,ranging from politics,economy to crisis.Among them,crisis news discourse seems more objective and impartial than that of other topics.However,the reality is that news reporters usually adopt language strategies to embed their ideologies in news discourse to express their standpoints and attitudes towards some influential events in the world.Therefore,it is of great significance to conduct a study which can prove that even in crisis news discourse,there is still biases existing.Employing Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Framework as the theoretical basis and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as the analytic tool,this study conducts a comparative analysis of ten news samples on refugee crisis in Europe in China Daily and The Washington Post.Based on Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Framework,the comparative analysis can be divided into three stages: the description stage,the interpretation stage and the explanation stage.Analysis in the first stage is carried out from the perspectives of transitivity,classification and modality;analysis in the second stage is carried out from the perspectives of news source and reporting mode;analysis in the third stage is carried out from the perspectives of institutional context and social context.In terms of transitivity,China Daily indicates European countries' indifferent attitudes towards refugees through reports on their difficult situations in Europe while The Washington Post portrays a responsible image of European countries through reports on immediate measures to solve the crisis.As far as classification is concerned,China Daily tends to employ derogatory words to show European Countries' incompetence in dealing with the crisis while The Washington Post is inclined to use commendatory words to describe efforts made by European countries.From the perspective of modality,there are more high value modal verbs in China Daily than those in The Washington Post,which indicates that there is a stronger critical mood in China Daily.In interpretation stage,specific source is dominant in China Daily while semi-specific source is leading in The Washington Post,which shows that China Daily is more objective than The Washington Post.In explanation stage,China Daily portrays a negative image of Europe while The Washington Post portrays a positive image of Europe.From the analysis above,conclusions can be drawn as follows: firstly,difference do exist in reports on refugee crisis in Europe in China Daily and The Washington Post;secondly,the factors causing the differences are political,economic,historical and cultural contexts;thirdly,the relationship among discourse,power and ideology is revealed by employing different language features,such as transitivity,lexical choice and modality.The choices serve for the news producer's values and ideologies.China Daily aims at creating a negative image of Europe by reporting inadequate efforts and refugees' anger.On the contrary,The Washington Post hopes to increase people's confidence towards the current social system by describing the immediate measures taken by the authority after the tragedy and official's concern towards the event.Therefore,news reports are not found to be objective as the countries' political and social values exert great influences on them.As a result,people should consider the information provided by the news reports critically and improve their critical awareness in the process of reading. |
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