A Critical Cognitive Study Of Anti-COVID-19 Vaccine Discourse Based On PPS Model

In the post-pandemic era,COVID-19 keeps resurging and Coronavirus variants become more easily transmissible among individuals.Additionally,a series of antiCOVID-19 vaccine protests erupt frequently in some Western countries,turning the public health emergency into a political issue.Academically speaking,anti-COVID-19 vaccine discourse is a mix of media discourse and political discourse and is rarely discussed before,which means it is a potential research topic for academic research.Little known is the implicit ideological differentiation behind anti-COVID-19 vaccine news reports.One feasible approach to disclosing the ideology is applying Critical Cognitive Linguistics(CCL)to in-depth discourse analysis.CCL has witnessed a“social turn” of Cognitive Linguistics and a “cognitive turn” of Critical Discourse Analysis,so it is applicable to multidisciplinary studies.The thesis aims to construct a PPS(Point of view-Proximization-Sociocognition)model to analyze different media stance in anti-COVID-19 vaccine discourse,reveal the different structures of discourse spaces construed in anti-COVID-19 vaccine discourse,and illustrate what sociocognitive factors are concerned with the ideological differentiation at the micromeso-macro levels of analysis.This study,taking 46 collected news reports from Fox News and CNN pertaining to anti-COVID-19 vaccine protests as data,conducts a multilevel critical cognitive analysis.The following three research questions are answered based on the research results:(1)What is the hidden stance of the left-wing and right-wing media towards antiCOVID-19 vaccine protests in news reports and how it is revealed by micro Po V strategies?(2)What are the different structural distributions of the meso discourse spaces in anti-COVID-19 vaccine discourse construed by the two media? How is the differentiation projected into the STA model?(3)What macro sociocognitive factors give rise to the ideological differentiation of the media towards anti-COVID-19 vaccine movements?This study explores the ideological differentiation in anti-COVID-19 vaccine discourse based on the PPS model,and concludes the following findings:(1)In micro-level,CNN,a democratic news provider,tends to strategically use Po V devices ranging from asymmetrical “action chain” to active voice,nominalization and broader viewing frames to assign blame to the protesters that spark the demonstration,whilst Fox News,a republican outlet,inclines to favor reciprocal transactive constructions,passive voice,metonymy and narrower viewing frames to attribute responsibility to police and government that launched the vaccine mandate.(2)In meso-level,the ratio of distributions of three proximization strategies of the two media is: spatial>temporal>axiological.But interestingly,the entities along the three axes in the discourse spaces are completely opposite,which reconfirms the ideological differentiation in between.(3)In macro-level,the linguistically-manifested stance difference and physical conflicts in reality are a kind of political ideological differentiation in nature.The competing groups knowledge and attitudes of the social cognition system between the democrat and the republican show up in the disguise of anti-COVID-19 protests.Theoretically,the present study integrates a multilevel critical cognitive analysis model termed PPS(Point of view-Proximization-Sociocognition)to examine ideological differentiation hidden behind the anti-COVID-19 vaccine discourse and reveal the social cognitive causations.It illustrates the feasibility of the newlyintegrated analysis model and proves its multilevel explanatory power.Therefore,this model provides new insights into critical cognitive discourse analysis.Empirically,first,the research scope of Critical Cognitive Linguistics can be hopefully extended in the thesis to anti-vaccine discourse.Taking COVID-19-related discourse as the primary research object contributes to introducing a new topic to Critical Cognitive discourse analysis.Realistically,the COVID-19 pandemic,as a global concern in recent years,is closely interrelated to individual life and human society worldwide.Hopefully,the thesis encourages people to develop critical thinking abilities in the face of piling news reports pertaining to our health issues from different sources,so as to tell the real intents of discourse producers.