The Changes Of The Identities Of Chinese Women In The Past Ten Years-A Corpus-Based Study Of Media Discourse Analysis

With the development of Chinese society and the change of ages,Chinese women have changed from the images of Chinese wives and mothers at home to those of female intellectuals,female politicians and female entrepreneurs in various social fields.The ways of projecting women’s images have also improved.In the past,Chinese women’s images or identities were mostly created in literary works;whereas in present digital world Chinese women’s identities are being created in different media reports.Accordingly,the studies of the construction of Chinese women’s identity have shifted from the focus of literary works to that of media.Despite such shift in studies of the construction of Chinese women’s identity,many of Chinese researchers explore how literary texts create the images of Chinese women,thus largely neglecting how media mirror "real" Chinese women in social reality.To fill in this gap,this thesis intends to probe into the changes of Chinese women’s identity constructed over 10 years’ media reports via media discourse analysis.To this end,the author chose digital version of Women of China(2007-2016),an authoritative digital magazine,which tends to report events related to Chinese women in a realistic and comprehensive way.After deleting the repeated reports and pictures,a corpus of 764 reports(324516 English words in totality)related to Chinese women was created.In order to scientifically and effectively analyze the data from the self-created corpus,the author employed newspaper discourse analysis developed by Van Dijk from both macro-and-micro perspectives,because Van Dijk’s framework is most appropriate to help researchers explore the ways of constructing the identity of Chinese women in media reports.When data were analyzed within Van Dijk’s framework from macro perspective,the analysis was further conducted from critical discourse analysis proposed by Fairclough.Hence,two research questions are raised,namely,(1)How do media reports in Women of China construct the identities of Chinese women in terms of content from a macro perspective?(2)How do media reports in Women of China construct the identities of Chinese women in terms of context,rhetoric strategy and modal verbs from a micro perspective?To answer these two research questions,quantitative and qualitative analysis were used.With the assistance of corpus-based study,the key words,words frequency and index lines were sought,counted and identified.With the further use of Van Dijk’s framework of media discourse analysis complemented by Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis,the topics,number,context,rhetoric devices and modal verbs were analyzed from macro-and-micro perspectives.The results of analysis suggested the following results.Contents of the reports were related to the fields of culture,policy,economy,sports,science,welfare for Chinese women,Chinese women’s lived world,and the development of society.There was an interactive relationship between the change of ages and the identities of Chinese women.There was an increasing number of reports about culture,policy,economy,and the development of society with the development of China.All these results indicate that media reporters in their media reports endeavored to project Chinese women as new identities in contributing to the society and social development.Furthermore,modal verbs,rhetoric strategy and contexts were found to be used to construct all these Chinese women’s identities with an intended purpose to demonstrate China’s great progress made in recent years,namely,a certain ideology hidden behind the lines.Therefore,not only does the result of this study present the image of identity of present Chinese women,but also the study provides means for other researcher to study the links among texts,discourse and social context.In this sense,this study has its theoretical and practical significance.