A Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Texts On China-US Trade War

In this research,the "China-US trade war" news texts are taken as the research object.47 news reports from China Daily and 23 from The New York Times are selected respectively to build two corpora.Employing Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework as the basic theoretical framework and corpus-linguistic techniques as the analytical tools,this research carries out text analysis,intertextuality analysis,and social analysis at the description,interpretation,and explanation stages.At the description stage,using AntConc3.2.1w to calculate word frequency lists and keyword lists of the two corpora,this research explores the similarities and differences of the two media’s discursive construction on the China-US trade war event through the analysis of the 25 most frequent notional words,the top 25 keywords,collocations and concordance lines of some lexical items.It is found that China Daily and The New York Times share similarities in the discursive construction,namely,both the two media pay close attention to the trade war caused by America president Trump ’s tariff imposition on Chinese goods and its economic impact.The differences in the discursive construction of China-US trade war event between China Daily and The New York Times are:(1)China Daily’s discursive construction on China-US trade war is more economy-oriented while The New York Times focuses on both political and economic issues.(2)China Daily tends to objectively report China’s positive attitude towards pursuing cooperation and maintaining good relations with America,whereas The New York Times inclines to stress China as a threat in this event.At the interpretation stage,news sources,reporting modes,and reporting verbs are annotated with the assistance of UAM Corpus Tool 3 and the intertextuality analysis of them are executed in this research to interpret the differences in attitudes towards this event between the two media.The research demonstrates that The New York Times is against the escalation of the trade war but supports Trump to suppress China,whereas China Daily opposes to the trade war and believes that the foundation of China-US economic relations is win-win cooperation.At the explanation stage,this research explains the ideologies reflected in the text analysis and intertextuality analysis from the perspectives of the institutional context,situational context and societal context.The research suggests that the ideologies reflected in the text can be attributed to the differences in political systems,economic situation,and sociocultural background of the two countries.This research is expected to enrich the corpus-assisted CDA and remind readers to cultivate critical thinking ability when reading English news texts.