A Critical Discourse Analysis of Chinese and Foreign Medias News Report on "China-US Trade War" 中外媒体关于“中美贸易战”的新闻报道的批判性话语分析文献综述
2020-04-18 20:41:31
1. Introduction Recently, the Sino-US trade war has become an important issue affecting Sino-US relations and even globalization. Chinese and foreign media have also reported on Sino-US trade relations many times. In general, news discourse is considered to be an unbiased record of objective world facts, and the language is without any emotional color. However, news discourse is also produced in the context of specific social conditions and ideologies, and in fact always implies ideology. In order to meet the needs of different social and cultural backgrounds, an event may be reported differently. Criticism linguistics, as an important method of discourse analysis, aims to study the relationship between language, power and consciousness. Through the superficial linguistic form or structure, it reveals how ideology and discourse originate from social structure and power relations and how to serve it. 1.1Need for the study Sino-US trade relations have developed in friction and twists since the establishment of trade relations between the two countries. In 2018, the Trump administration disregarded the Chinese dissuasion, insisted on launching a trade war, set off a Sino-US trade war, and caused domestic and foreign media to report. Generally speaking, news reports should be objective and fair, but in fact, influenced by specific social conditions and ideological background, the language contains different ideologies. Fowler pointed out that ”the 'content' of newspapers is not facts about the world, but in a very general sense 'ideas'. Language is not neutral, but a highly constructive mediator. ”(Roger Fowler, 1991) As a new approach to discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis is based on Halliday's systemic functional grammar. It aims to reveal the relationship between language, power and ideology through superficial linguistic forms. As a discourse of public communication, through the study of Chinese and foreign media's news reports on Sino-US trade wars, analyzing the relationship between news discourse and ideology, and helping us to deeply understand the essence of news reports of different nationalities and the hidden ideology after the reports. 1.2 Research purpose This study selects the Sino-US trade war as a news event, collects news reports from foreign media on this same event and builds a corpus, and conducts critical discourse analysis on the language vocabulary used in news discourse, trying to understand the following aspects: 1. What are the similarities and differences between Chinese and foreign media in the choice of language when reporting the same news event? 2. How news reports are influenced by ideology and cultural background and are reflected in news discourse? 3. How do these news reports reflect the image of China and Sino-US relations? As a tool for expressing ideas, language is not completely objective and fair. The news discourse does not simply reflect the event itself, but directly participates in it and has an impact on people's thoughts. Therefore, this paper aims to conduct critical discourse analysis of news reports about the same event in Chinese and foreign media, reveal the relationship between language, power, and ideology, including the influence of ideology on the process of discourse formation, the reaction of discourse to ideology, and how the two derive from social structure and power relations. 2. Literature review Critical discourse analysis is a discourse analysis method that Western linguists represented by Roger Fowler have revealed the dialectical relationship between language and ideology through superficial language since the 1970s. News discourse analysis is one of the main research objects of critical discourse analysis. As a news language of social practice, it reflects social reality from various angles, and reproduces ideology to influence people's attitudes, values, beliefs, etc., so that the ideology and power relations behind the language and the interests of the representatives of the right to speak are naturalized. Critical discourse analysis focuses on the power relations and inequalities of language, explores the hidden power relations in discourse and social cultural forms, analyzes the implicit ideology in discourse, and exposes the inequalities, injustices, discrimination and prejudice in discourse. Roger Fowler is the first person to conduct a critical analysis of news discourse. He believes that news reports are not as objective and fair reports as they claim, but imply a certain ideology. (Roger Fowler, 1991) However, for a long time, it has been dominated by qualitative research, and is constrained by the interpretation of individual texts or text fragments. Qualitative research methods have been criticized by some scholars for their preference for subjectivity and lack of representation. Critical discourse analysis should not be limited to the analysis of text fragments, but should be based on large-scale sample surveys on the generality of typical language use. (Stubbs, M.1997) 2.1 Critical discourse analysis theory of news discourse The social environment and culture influence language, and language reflects a specific social and cultural environment. Critical Discourse Analysis believes that language is not an objective and transparent communication medium and has an intervention effect on the social development process. Critical discourse analysis aims to expose and interpret the power relations and ideology contained in the language. (Xin, B. Gao,X.L.,2013) Fairclough pointed out that language is a social practice that reflects reality from all angles and manipulates and influences social processes by recreating ideology. (Fairclough ,1992) The critical discourse analysis of news articles is based on the systemic functional grammar as the main theoretical basis and method source. Fairclough's three-dimensional discourse model (Fairclough, 1989) uses Halliday's systemic functional grammar as the main language analysis tool to form the relationship between language, power, and ideology through discourse. It is an interpretive and constructive method of linguistic analysis. It has a guiding role in both theory and practice for new culture and research. It provides an analytical process for critical discourse researchers and can be applied systematically to various texts. Fairclough's Three dimensional model is heavily influenced by Halliday's systemic functional grammar. Halliday regards language as a social symbol, pays attention to the use of language in practice, and explains the three major language functions of language: Ideational metafunction, Interpersonal meta function, Textual metafunction. Fairclough's three-dimensional discourse model treats discourse as a continuum of three dimensions: Discourse Practice, Social Practice, and Text, trying to explore the dialectical relationship between them. Fairclough's three-dimensional discourse model is a model of critical discourse analysis that is both beneficial to practice and theory. It gives people a deep understanding of the inner and inseparable relationship between language and society, and interprets the true meaning and the role of discourse through the obscuration of ideology. That is, discourse not only reflects social processes and social structures, but also has a constructive effect on social processes and social structures. The three steps of Fairclough's critical discourse are: Describe, Interpret, and Explain. The description process describes the formal characteristics of the text, such as: grammatical structure, vocabulary selection characteristics, etc., to analyze and explain the relationship between text and interaction. The interpretation process analyzes the relationship between interaction and social context from the construction of the text. The process of interpretation is the analysis of the relationship between dialogue and social factors, with the aim of analyzing the role of social factors in the process of text generation and interpretation .(Fairclough 1989) 2.2 Application of Corpus Technology in Critical Discourse Analysis of News Discourse A corpus-based critical study of news discourse, focusing on quantitative analysis, reduces the subjective bias of researchers, and helps to discover the subjectivity of the speaker in the cumulative effects presented by a large number of discourses (e.g., related evaluations, Modality, positional research) and sociality (identity, gender differences, ideology, etc.). Combining the text analysis of discourse with social context analysis, the corpus-based news discourse research contains the qualitative and interpretative summarization and analysis of the researcher. It is a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, which is solving the problem of the lack of objectivity and validity of traditional critical discourse analysis proposed by linguists such as Widdowson and Stubbs. Many scholars at home and abroad, such as Fairclough, Partington, and Stubb, have tried to apply corpus technology to critical discourse analysis and have made important explorations in this field. Using the corpus method to conduct news discourse analysis is to collect a large number of types of news corpus to build a corpus for a certain research purpose, through corpus tools such as: Frequency, Keyword Statistics, Concordance, Collocation, Cluster to analyze the special meaning implied by linguistic phenomena. 3.Conclusion Language is a tool for the expression of thoughts. Different reports on the same incident imply different views of the subject. 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Outline 1.Introduction 1.1 Need for the study 1.2 Research purpose 2. Literature review 2.1 Critical discourse analysis theory of news discourse 2.2 Application of Corpus Technology in Critical Discourse Analysis of News Discourse 3.conclusion 4.reference