A Study On Ideologies Of Boss Discourse In Only You-a Critical Discourseanalysis

In recent years, along with the great pressure, young Chinese are beginning to take amore active strategy when hunting for jobs. Some job-hunting talk shows come into beingresponding to such phenomenon. Only You (Fei Ni Mo Shu) by Tianjin TV causes asensation all over China especially among young people. Researchers begin to examine thisprogram from different views. However, these kinds of researches are mainly from theperspective of Communication, Sociology or Psychology and they always focus on onlyone side of the program. Most of the articles are interpretative reports, informal essays ordescription of Only You, which bears strong personal feelings. However, few of themdiscuss from the perspective of CDA, not to mention the studies of the ideology. In fact,boss discourse in Only You, like any other discourse in general, is never conveyinginformation neutrally, but ideologically invested.So far, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) researches have mainly paid attention topolitical discourse or news discourse, but few of them have done on TV program, especiallyon job-hunting talk shows. In this thesis, CDA which is a combined theoretical andmethodological approach works as the basic framework for analyzing the ideologies in bossdiscourse. As a newly-developed approach, CDA views language as a kind of socialpractice and also tries to analyze discourse from socio-cultural aspects. Ideologies areimplicit in the conventions, which people are not consciously aware but interactlinguistically depending on. Discourse as the ideological practice, reflects ideology andconstructs ideology at the same time. Every language use is not of equivalent ideologicaleffects though ideology invests language. Thus the ideological analysis of boss discourse inOnly You is processed on three linguistic devices: modality, personal pronoun system andintertextuality, and that is on two levels: lexical level and textual level, with Fairclough'sThree—dimensions (description, interpretation, explanation) running through on the bothlevels.First the paper offers a theoretical and methodology basis for the analysis ofideologies and then uses the theoretical framework to examine how the bosses representideologies through language. This paper takes a lead for further study on similarjob-hunting talk shows from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis and helpsaudience better understand the implications of the boss discourse from a different point ofview. Of course, by using these above linguistics devices, the author exposes the realintention of the bosses.