Abstract

Critical linguistics, also called critical discourse analysis (CDA), is a new subject which is based on linguistics as well as the achievements of scientific researches in the field of sociology, psychology, and mass media etc. It 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. The paper applies Halliday’s (2000) functional model and Fairclough’s (1989) model of CDA to make a quantitative and qualitative analysis on the eight news reports about Diaoyu Islands in the TIME magazine in 2012. The author takes Transitivity, Transformation and Modality as analytical tools to analyze the news report discourse. Through the analysis, the author finds that the seemingly objective news reports of American media are not merely the reflections of the reality, and the author tries to reveal the different ideologies hidden in them so that readers may have a better understanding of news discourse and news criticism as well.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.