A Study Of The Identity Construction Of American Undocumented Immigrants In The New York Times From The Perspective Of The Discourse-Historical Approach

Taking the Discourse-Historical Approach(DHA)put forward by Wodak as the theoretical framework,this research makes a critical discourse analysis of the news reports on American undocumented immigrants published in The New York Times and analyzes their identity construction and the intentions of the reporters.This thesis aims to improve people’s understanding of discursive strategies in news reports and their critical awareness.This research mainly applies the discursive strategies and context of the DHA to make analysis of the data,and it adopts qualitative analysis as the primary research method and adopts the quantitative analysis as the auxiliary.Using “undocumented immigrants” as the search term,this research searches news reports on American undocumented immigrants published in The New York Times from January 1st,2017 to December 31 st,2019 from the database Lexis Nexis.This research sorts the results by the database’s self-contained“relevance”,and the top 100 news reports are selected as the data source.This thesis answers the following three research questions:(1)What identity of American undocumented immigrants is constructed in The New York Times?(2)How is such identity constructed in The New York Times?(3)What are the causes of such identity construction?The following are the major research findings:(1)American undocumented immigrants are mainly constructed as the desirable,victims and a threat in The New York Times.(2)After analyzing the research data with the aid of the DHA,this research finds that such identity construction in The New York Times is made by means of five discursive strategies and context.(3)There are mainly three causes of such identity construction in The New York Times: American economic development depends on the contribution of immigrants;Trump tightens the immigration policy during his presidency and populism rises in the U.S.This research has certain practical values.Firstly,the DHA is helpful to reveal the intention of the author,improve people’s reading ability and raise their critical awareness.Secondly,this research helps to improve people’s understanding of CDA,and it might be used for reference in the application of the DHA in the study of identity construction.Thirdly,this research is conducive to enhancing students’ writing and reading ability,and it can work as a reference for English writing and reading teaching.