| Since May 2019,the US government has imposed a series of sanctions against Huawei,marking the escalation of the trade war between China and the US into science and technology war.Huawei Issue has made great impact on the economic and scientific cooperation between China and the United States,which has increasingly been focused by the official mainstream media in both countries.The reports from China and the United States on Huawei Issue reflect their attitudes and positions towards the same issue,which deserves attention and deeply research.However,from the perspective of critical discourse research,there is still a lack of in-depth and comprehensive research on the report of this event.Therefore,based on the theoretical framework of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model,this study aims to conduct a contrastive analysis of the selected reports on Huawei Issue between Chinese and American mainstream media aided by Systemic-functional Grammar.In addition,the author attempts to reveal the different ideologies between Chinese and American mainstream media by interpreting the linguistic features and intertextuality of news discourse.The corpora in this study come from the reporting articles on Huawei Issue in China Daily and The New York Times(60 and 52 articles respectively)and then are built into two mini-corpora with 33,255 tokens and 34,752 tokens respectively.With the help of research instruments Ant Conc3.5.7 and Tree Tagger,the study attempts to explore a comprehensive comparative analysis from three dimensions: textual analysis,discursive practice analysis and social practice analysis,aiming to answer three questions:(1)What are the differences between China Daily and The New York Times corpora in terms of language features? And what hidden ideologies are presented by these differences?(2)What are the differences between China Daily and The New York Times corpora in terms of intertextuality? And what potential attitudes are presented by these differences?(3)What factors that lead to the different ideologies in China Daily and The New York Times from the perspective of institutional context and social-cultural context?The main findings are as follows:(1)At the textual level,it is observed that there are significant differences between Chinese and American newspapers in terms of the linguistic features and potential ideologies.The analysis of the lexical choice shows that China Daily focuses on the resolution measures of Huawei Issue taken by Chinese government,creating a confident,responsible,cooperative and positive image of China.On the contrary,The New York Times is concerned about the U.S.government’s sanction measures against Huawei and identifies that Huawei has posed a threat to American national security,creating a passive,weak,aggressive and negative image of China.For transitivity analysis,material process and verbal process are mostly used by the media of China and the United States.The Chinese media is more objective in the reporting,while the American media tends to blur its responsibilities.In terms of the use of modal verbs,medium-value modal verbs are mostly adopted by both Chinese and American media with the proportion of 68.7% and 53.8% respectively But the analysis also shows that the proportions of modal verbs of high and low value in American media(7.9% and 38.3% respectively)are slightly higher than those in Chinese media.It is found that these high and low-value modal verbs are mostly used in negative and improper reports.(2)At the level of discursive practice,in terms of news source,it is revealed that semi-specific and unidentified sources used by American media(36% and 1% respectively)are more than those in Chinese media(11% and0% respectively).As to the reporting mode,the proportion of indirect speech(53%)is higher than direct speech(47%)in The New York Times.The use of indirect speeches,semi-specific and unidentified news sources in American media weakens the authenticity of reports and deliberately hides the ideology that serves the American government.(3)From the perspective of social practice analysis,it is observed that there are some factors that lead to the different ideologies between the two newspapers on Huawei Issue,such as institutional and social-cultural contexts.Institutionally,China Daily and The New York Times represent the interests of their countries and attempt to transmit their own ideologies.Cultural conflicts are the fundamental factor causing the technical conflicts between the two countries.The study enriches the research perspective of Huawei Issue and also provides some suggestions for domestic media on how to carry out international publicity efficiently on Huawei Issue. |
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