A Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Chinese Covid-19 Vaccines In People’s Daily And The New York Times: From The Perspective Of Proximization Theory

The corona virus disease 2019(COVID-19)is a devastating threat to public health,social order and national security in China and the international community.Both domestic and foreign media have paid close attention to the popularization of vaccines since March 18,2020.Scholars at home and abroad have also carried out relevant researches and achieved some results,but no scholars in the field of linguistics have conducted studies from the perspective of Proximization Theory to explore this kind of discourse.Taking Proximization Theory of Piotr Cap(2013)as theoretical framework,the thesis collected news reports concerning Chinese coronavirus vaccines in People’s Daily and the New York Times from March 7,2020 to December 1,2021 to conduct critical discourse analysis and explore two questions:(1)What are the linguistic means used to construct spatial,temporal and axiological proximization strategies in news reports concerning Chinese COVID-19 vaccines in People’s Daily and the New York Times?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the category and frequency of proximization strategies used in People’s Daily and the New York Times? What are the reasons for the aforementioned similarities and differences?The results are as follows.(1)In spatial proximization,People’s Daily applies items like “China”,“the world” and “humanity” as well as“COVID-19” and “the United States” as inside-deictic-center entities(IDCs)and the outside-deictic-center entities(ODCs)respectively.It employs verb phrases like “hoard” and “die” and noun phrases like“threat” and “vaccine gap” to show the proximization process and threats.Whereas in the New York Times,noun phrases like “people”,“the U.S.”and “the world” as well as “Chinese vaccines” and “China” are used as IDCs and ODCs.Verb phrases like “threaten” and “die” and noun phrases such as “fear”,“death” and “safety hazard” are adopted to depict the promximization and dangers.In temporal proximization,the contrast use of the simple past and the present perfect tense,modal auxiliaries and contrastive parallel are employed.In axiological proximization,the Chinese press employs items like “cooperation” and “equitable distribution” as positive values and “American First” and “groundless reports” as negative values.In contrast,the American press applies noun phrases like “effectiveness”,“transparency” and “security” as positive values and “vaccine diplomacy” and “coercive measure”as negative values.(2)About the category of proximization strategies,two presses mainly exert spatial proximization and take axiological proximization as a complement.In spatial proximization,they both adopt six categories,metonymy mechanism and third person pronoun.But differences lie in the division of camps,preference on category and the frequency.In temporal proximization,they apply contrastive use of tenses,modal verbs and contrastive parallel.And they both prefer future-to-present conceptual shift.But differences are frequency and stress.In axiological proximization,Chinese news reports actively employ positive values whereas American news reports prefer negative ones.About the frequency,there are great differences.The frequency of spatial proximization is 3.01% versus 1.99%.The frequency of temporal proximization is 0.3% versus 0.46%.And the frequency of axiological proximization is 0.75% versus 0.49%.As for latent reasons,People’s Daily aims to build and spread a governance concept that is in line with the state and the government,which is the government serves and protects people’s health and interests.And as a positive and responsible practical power,China shares common interests with the world,adheres to the principle of a Global Community of Health for All.While the New York Times questions and delegitimizes China’s vaccines and actions.The American press implicitly supports and spreads the ideology like“America First”,freedom,equality,individualism and pragmatism.Theoretically,this study verifies the strong explanatory power of PT,which remedies the deficiency of critical discourse analysis,and provides a new theoretical perspective.Empirically,this study adopts the combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods,which provides reference for scholars who intend to investigate vaccine news discourse when choosing research perspectives and methods.Additionally,by analyzing the use of proximization strategies in the reports of People’s Daily and the New York Times,this study can help readers understand the linguistic means and similarities and differences of strategies.It is also conducive to revealing the ideology and real intentions behind the discourse,and cultivating readers’ critical thinking ability.Finally,based on research findings,some suggestions are proposed,which are conducive to applying PT to critical discourse analysis of vaccines and carrying out empirical research with mixed research approach so as to reveal the discursive strategies used by discourse producers and their real intentions.And the limitations of this thesis and implications on future related studies are discussed in the end.