A Critical Discourse Analysis On News About Syria Airstrikes

US,UK,and France attacked Syria in response to the claimed chemical attack of Assad government in Douma.The study compares news about Syria airstrikes from US,UK,and China to investigate the linguistic features of media discourse and ideology behind language.It is an important case study on media discourse to examine the applicability of Fairclough's Three-dimensional Framework.It reveals the discourse strategies and real intention of Western media to justify the airstrikes.It helps the public become more aware of ideology in media discourse and resist the underlying manipulation.The corpus-assisted critical discourse study does both qualitative and quantitative analysis on collected news from the New York Times,the Daily Telegraph,and China Daily.Texts are analyzed under the Three-dimensional Framework as text,discursive practice,and social practice respectively.At the text level,the analysis shows Western media make lexical choice like abstract and impersonal words to shape public cognition and redefine the airstrikes.Negative semantic prosody is constructed to accuse Russia's interference in Syria affairs.A binary opposition is formed between civilians and Assad government and the US is referred to as judge and savior.The analysis of thematic and schematic structure suggests themes are hierarchically constructed.The favored statements receive more attention.The analysis of transitivity shows sentence structure and lexical classification give positive roles to the West but negative roles to Syria and its allies.At the level of discursive practice,the analysis of intertextuality shows the quotation sources of Western media are featured with unbalanced distribution of discourse power and close-chain inter-quotation.The reporting modes are featured with unbalanced distribution of direct discourse and the blurring of indirect discourse.At the level of social practice,a dialectic relationship exists between discourse and social reality.Western media seek to confirm Douma attack and justify the airstrikes by partially reporting the events and the real focus is on the US-Russia wrestle.Media discourse,whether true or not,finally becomes part of evidence and social reality.