A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Reports On South China Sea Arbitration From China Daily And Washington Post

The thesis makes use of Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework to have a tentative analysis of the news reports selected from China Daily and the Washington Post on South China Sea arbitration,aiming to explore the ideology in the language of the news reports in question and to justify Critical Discourse Analysis as an approach of linguistic study.With the purpose in mind the author will try to find answers to the frollowing three questions:1)What are the linguistic strategies that China Daily and the Washington Post adopt to render their opinions in the issue of South China Sea arbitration?Namely,what are the similarities and dif ferences between their choices of linguistic strategies?2)What information do China Daily and the Washington Post intent to convey to readers’?3)What are the ideologies implanted in these reports?To be further,what are the possible elements that sustain the ideologies?Following Fairclough’s three-dimensional model,the present study is conducted at three level s.Namely,at the level of text,the author makes a detailed analysis of the linguistic features of the news reports from the three aspects like key words,lexical classification and mood system.At the level of social practice,the author makes an investigation of the intertextuality of the news reports with the analysis of speech sources and speech reporting modes.At the level of social practice,the author makes an analysis of the social context under which the news reports are produced,distributed and consumed from institutional,political,economical and geographical aspects.The findings of the current study indicate:(1)In the news reports,the linguistic strategies that China Daily and the Washington Post adopt can be summarized as the following five aspects,including key words emphasizing,lexical classification,mood expression,speech sources and speech reporting modes.These two media are similar in the use of the former three ones.To be specific,these three strategies are used to implant the ideologies in the language of news reports in the way of matching with the interest of the two media.For the latter two ones,there exist a difference.China Daily tries to facilitate the reliability of its reports though emphasizing the strategy of speech sources while the Washington Post tries to strengthen the objectivity of its reports with the strategy of speech reporting modes.(2)For the information transfer,China Daily focuses on the illegality of the "arbitration","tribunal" and its "ruling" and China’s opposing stance;on the contrary,the Washington Post emphasizes the legality of the "arbitration" and the binding of the "ruling"(3)From the standpoint of defending national interest,China Daily strongly argues on the basis of reasons,and firmly believes that the South China Sea arbitration is an’politically biased event driven by economic interest,in which America plays the role of instigator and manipulator;the Washington Post portrays an irresponsible image of China and makes a connection between China’s stance on the "arbitration" and China’s rise of recent years,which is another reflection of its attitude towards "China Threat Theory".All these ideologies are the reflections of the fighting and gaming between two interest groups,which is closely related to social institutions,economic interest and regional sovereign.