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A Contrastive Analysis of Western and China’s News Reports on Olympic Torch Relay Disruption from the Perspective of CDA

Author: XiongShan
Tutor: LiZhengLin
School: Central China Normal University
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: critical discourse analysis news reports contrastive study
CLC: G212
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2009
Downloads: 305
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Abstract

Critical linguistics,also called critical discourse analysis(CDA),is a new subject which is based on linguistics as well as combines the achievements of scientific researches in the field of linguistics,sociology,psychology,and mass media etc. Discourse,particularly media discourse,is the main domain of CDA which aims to penetrate the linguistic forms of discourse and then disclose how ideology influences discourse as well as how discourse affects ideology from various angles.Critical linguists make critical analysis on the structure of discourse,accordingly expose some obvious political and ideological features,and then reinforce people’s "linguistic awareness" also enhance their abilities on evaluating language in use.CDA puts great emphasis on non-literary discourse,news discourse in particular.The principle of news reporting is to objectively and faithfully uncover the events,including causes and consequences. However,fair,objective and unbiased reporting of "hard facts" in language hardly exists. The reporters decide to what to be reported according to their own understanding of the events,the expectation of the audience and the stance of the news agencies or government they represent.The theoretical basis and analytical tool of CDA is Halliday’s Functional Grammar. The application of Functional Grammar in the field of autobiographies,novels,poems, and advertising discourses has made a lot of achievements.As for the application of news discourses,linguists home and abroad such as Fairclough,Fowler,Kress,Wudak,Van Dijk,Xin Bin,Chen Zhongzhu and Chen Zhongzhu have done relatively deep researches. This thesis is a tentative application of Halliday’s Functional Grammar to a contrastive study of western and China’s journalistic discourses(in the English version) concerning the disruption of Beijing Olympic torch relay.To construct the theoretical basis for the whole thesis,the author first introduces the basic notions of Critical Linguistics such as discourse and discourse analysis and then explores its theoretical basis,Halliday’s Functional Grammar.The research chiefly examines the discourse from the angle of grammar and makes contrastive analysis on the discourses from Halliday’s theory of transitivity system,transformation,classification, modality and thematic structures.The author intends to find a more comprehensive way to analyze how journalistic discourses reflect different ideologies and power relationships. In the part of contrastive analysis,the author first gives a brief introduction to the related background information about the disruption of Beijing Olympic torch relay.Both western and China’s media have done lots of reporting on the same issue,but they hold different attitudes towards the whole event.At last,the author makes a contrastive study of the news reports on the disruption of Beijing Olympic torch relay to support the arguments that have been made previously.From the contrastive study of the news reports,the author draws the conclusion that CDA is a powerful tool for probing into the relationship between language,power and ideology.CDA pays significant attention to social problems.It explores the relationship between discourse and ideology in order to show language not only reflects society but also takes part in the constitution of social structures and relationships.The significance of the present study lies in its fairly effective analytic approach and its representative linguistic corpus-news reports on the disruption of Beijing Olympic torch relay from western and China’s authoritative websites.The analysis moves beyond the simple description of linguistic phenomena,and tries to reveal the different ideologies hidden in them so that readers may have a better understanding of news discourses and news criticism as well.

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