Critical Discourse Analysis of News Reports— Based on the Guardian News Report of China’s Military Parade to Mark the 70 Years of Second World War

Abstract

Critical Discourse Analysis (abbreviated as CDA below), was firstly introduced by an English linguist, Norman Fairclough in the late 1980s. And CDA mainly focuses on public and non-literature discourse and it mainly applies Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar (abbreviated as SFG below). Since China announced the decision of holding a military parade to celebrate the 70’s anniversary of WWII victory, massive negative voices among the international society have been crowding in on China. Therefore, the present study was prompted to focus on the news report of China’s military parade to celebrate the victory of WWII from the Guardian, and use Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Model of CDA as theoretical framework and apply Halliday’s SFG as analytic tools to study two questions: How does the reporter insert his ideology in the news text of the Guardian news report on China’s Military Parade to Mark the 70 Years of Second World War? What kinds of the social and historical ideologies bear in and account for the news? Through the analysis, it finds that Guardian’s reports overemphasize and over interpret the negative influences of parade.