A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Internet Rumors In China

Internet rumors,as the product of the We-media era,have negative impacts on our daily life.Compared with traditional rumors,Internet rumors spread faster and more widely,and are more destructive to our society.Domestic scholars have conducted researches on Internet rumors from the perspectives of Psychology,Communication,and Sociology to analyze the production,circulation,social harm and control countermeasures of Internet rumors,but there are few researches on the rumor discourse.Critical discourse analysis(CDA),as a new branch of modern linguistics,takes a critical perspective to explore the relationship between language and society,aiming to reveal ideology and power relations hidden in discourse.Up to now,the objects of CDA have focused on News discourse and Political discourse,with a lack of research on other types of discourse.In need of making a comprehensive study of Internet rumors and expanding the field of CDA,this thesis conducts a critical discourse analysis of Internet rumors.As a critical linguist,Fairclough stated that any discourse is a threedimensional unity of the text,discursive practice and social practice,which indicates that discourse is not only a static text with linguistic features,but also a discursive practice involving discourse production,distribution and consumption,as well as a social practice with social impacts.This emphasizes that discourse analysis cannot just stop at the deconstruction of semantic meaning of the text,but includes the exploration of speaker’s motivation and intention,and involves the discussion of social structures concerning with the speaker’s social identity.Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and guided by Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar,this study analyzes the rumor produced by a singer and aims to solve the following questions:1)What are the linguistic features of the selected rumor? What meanings do they convey?2)What are the social determinants of the rumor? What social harm has it caused?Corresponding to the three-dimensional model of discourse analysis,this study involves three stages: description of the linguistic features,interpretation of the productive and interpretative processes,and explanation of social conditions.In the dimension of text,by both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the transitivity system and lexical choice of rumor discourse,the semantic meaning of the selected rumor is deconstructed.In the dimension of discursive practice,the productive and interpretative processes of the rumor are interpreted,and the intention of rumormonger is revealed.In the dimension of social practice,the social determinants and social harm caused by the rumor are explained.From the analysis of the selected rumor,the major findings are as follows.First,the rumor involves material process,mental process,relational process and verbal process,related to the singer and the policeman’s actions,psychological activities,attributes and speeches.Material processes of the rumor show that there are a large number of clauses in which the actors are the policeman and the goals are the singer,which emphasizes the inequality between the policeman and the singer,and the policeman’s oppression to the singer.Relational processes of the rumor imply that the adjectives used to describe the attributes of the policeman are negative,which reflects that the policeman is unreasonable and abuses power.Verbal processes of the rumor infer that the policeman always plays the role of sayer while the singer always plays the role of receiver,suggesting that the policeman has discourse hegemony in the communication.In addition,the words related to the singer are mostly neutral words,while the words used to describe the policeman are mostly negative words.As the rumormonger,the singer’s attitude towards the police is negative,and she employed various linguistic devices to construct a negative image of the police and an ideal victim image of herself in the public’s mind.Then,the rumor is the product of the contradictions between social classes caused by the development of economy and culture.The wide spread of this rumor on the Internet has led a large number of netizens to consume it,which not only intensifies contradictions between social classes,but also damages government’s credibility and sustains celebrities’ discourse hegemony on the Internet.This thesis provides a linguistic approach to studying Internet rumors and expands the research field of critical discourse analysis.Moreover,this study reveals the essence of rumors,improves the public’s understanding of rumors,and raises their awareness of critical reading,which contributes to inhibiting the spread of Internet rumors.However,there are limitations of this study.This study selects a rumor for analysis and the social problems reflected are not in a wide range.For further study,comprehensive researches on Internet rumors in this field are suggested to reveal more social problems for the governance of Internet rumors.