| As English prevails in the international community,mass media in English nowadays has become the primary means for the dissemination and exchange of information.News reporting,which seems to be impartial,intentionally or unintentionally conveys the ideology of a specific group,and goes a step further to manipulate the attitude and view of the public.As Xin(2005: 84)puts it,news reporting is a social practice while news discourse,as the product of this practice,contains or reflects the stance and opinion of its generator like any other types of discourse,and as a consequence,it is impossible for news discourse to reflect the objective fact and social reality without bias.Therefore,news discourse has long been one of the major targets for critical discourse studies,aiming to unveil the ideology behind.This thesis takes the deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense(THAAD)anti-missile system in Republic of Korea(ROK)as the research subject,and gathers 160 news reports,half of which are from Chinese newspapers China Daily and Global Times and the other half from Korean newspapers Korea Times and The Korea Herald,with the help of Lexis-Nexis database.Based on the theoretical framework of Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model together with Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar and corpus,this research will examine the similarities and differences of linguistic features of news reports on THAAD from Chinese and Korean newspapers,and explore the discursive construction on THAAD so as to uncover the social and political factors behind the differences.The major findings of this study are listed as follows:First,at the description stage,the analysis on news discourse of THAAD focuses on the similarities and differences of linguistic features,i.e.text analysis,including lexical choice,modality and cohesion.In terms of lexical choice,it is found that both Chinese and Korean newspapers concern the objectivity of news coverage and share some similarities with regard to reporting content while there are some differences on reporting focuses and angles.In terms of modality,it is found that both Chinese and Korean newspapers attempt to deliver news coverage in an objective and impartial manner,while differences exist on the concrete contexts of modal verbs of high value and low value;with regards to cohesion,repetition of content words reveals that both Chinese and Korean newspapers focus on the interested parties relevant to THAAD deployment,while collocation demonstrates different reporting focus relevant to THAAD and attitudes towards THAAD between Chinese and Korean newspapers.Second,at the interpretation stage,the attention is paid to the processing analysis of relationship between the text and discursive practice from the perspective of intertextuality,including news sources and reporting modes.The analyses of news sources and reporting modes show that both Chinese and Korean newspapers tend to deliver news objectively,while the concrete usage strategies on news sources and reporting modes are based on what each side expects to express,serving their own ideologies.Third,at the explanation stage,the discourse analysis attaches great importance to a broader and deeper context and the author attempts to reveal the potential reasons of differences between Chinese and Korean newspapers on THAAD issue.The research findings reveal the stance and cognition of different sides upon the event of THAAD installation between Chinese and Korean newspapers in a direct and reliable manner from a critical perspective,which on the one hand can make readers aware of the connection between language and ideology,thus promoting a more rational and objective attitude of the public towards relative news reports,and on the other hand offer some implications for mass media to take advantage of certain strategies to help establish a more effective dialogue mechanism upon the THAAD issue. |
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