本文是一篇语言学论文，本研究从命名策略和述谓策略的角度，进一步分析了中英两国主流媒体关于肥胖症的话语建构。《新民晚报》将肥胖症建构为“增加患上慢性病风险的因素”和“具有传染性的疾病”，《泰晤士报》则将其描述为“公众卫生问题”和“社会资源分配的负担。
Chapter OneIntroduction
1.3 Research Objectives
This study is aimed at making a contrast on discourse construction on obesity betweenChinese and British newspapers,aiming at investigating the following questions:(1)How doXinmin Evening News and The Times construct discourse on obesity?(2)Are there anysimilarities and differences in discursive strategies adopted by Xinmin Evening News and TheTimes when reporting obesity?If so,what are the similarities and differences?(3)What arethe reasons for the differences of the construction on obesity between Xinmin Evening Newsand The Times?
In order to answer these questions,we respectively choose reports on obesity fromXinmin Evening News and The Times so that two self-built corpora on obesity can beconstructed.The main analytical tool,WordSmith Tools 6.0,is employed to observe andanalyze linguistic features of these texts.Finally,we can find similarities and differences ofdiscursive strategies between Xinmin Evening News and The Times when reporting obesity.
Chapter ThreeTheoretical Foundation and Methodology
3.1 Wodak’s Discourse-historical Approach
According to Reisigl and Wodak(2009),the fundamental parts for every approach incritical discourse analysis are critique,ideology and power,which are attached to differentconnotations in different approaches.Texts and data are supposed to be considered undercertain social contexts.Meanwhile,the political position of discourse participants is also afocus when taking discourse-historical approach into studies.Text or discourse-immanentcritique is designated to find inconsistencies,self-contradictions,paradoxes and dilemmas intexts or discourses.Socio-diagnostic critique concentrates on revealing the essence ofpersuasive or manipulative characters of discursive practices,in which usually contextualknowledge,social theories and theoretical models from various disciplines are employed.Future-related prospective critique tries to make contributions to the improvement ofcommunication.Ideology,as a consensus shared by a specific social group,is usuallyconsidered as a lopsided opinion or world outlook made up of related mental representations,convictions,opinions,attitudes and evaluations.In addition,ideologies may exert influenceon changing power relations more or less.Therefore the Discourse-historical Approach(hereafter DHA)pays close attention to the mode in which discursive practices mediate and reproduce ideologies in various social institutions.Then one of the objectives of the DHA isto figure out the hegemony and power relations of discourses by the means of unraveling theideologies that set up,sustain or challenge dominance.For the DHA,language itself is notpowerful.However,language can be the method used by certain people to gain and maintainpower,which can be the reason why the DHA tend to make a critical analysis on thediscursive practices of those in power who have opportunities to change conditions.Powerrefers to an asymmetric relationship among social participants who undertake different socialstances or belong to different social communities.
Chapter FourResults and Discussion
4.1 Keyword Analysis
Using WordSmith Tools,we can compare the frequencies in one wordlist against another,in order to get the words,namely,keywords,which occur much more often than expected inobserved corpus when compared to reference corpus.Then these keywords are compiledtogether to form a keyword list,which is beneficial to demonstrate words with greatsignificance in order to give a measure of saliency,while a word list just offers frequency(Baker,2006:125).For the reports from Xinmin Evening News,the reference corpus isXinhua Gigaword.For the reports from The Times,the reference corpus is the sample corpusof iWeb.In order to narrow down the study object,we choose the top 30 keywords accordingto their keyness.
4.1.1 Keyword Analysis on Reports from Xinmin Evening News
The following table shows the top 30 keywords in reports from Xinmin Evening News.
4.2 Discourse Strategy Analysis
According to Wodak and Michael(2009),discursive strategies in DHA mainly cover thefollowing five types:referential strategy or strategy of nomination,which is featured inmembership categorization,metaphors,metonymies and synecdoche;strategies of predicationwhere the object is evaluated as something with positive or negative attributes;strategies ofargumentation are employed in topoi,usually in terms of political inclusion or exclusion;strategies of perspectivization,in which specific methods of reporting,description,narrationor the quotation on certain events would appear;strategies of intensification and mitigation,inwhich the illocutionary force of utterance is intensified or mitigated.In this part,we mainlyfocus on the discourse strategies used in reports from Xinmin Evening News and The Times,which are strategy of nomination and strategy of predication.
Chapter FiveConclusion
5.1 Major Findings
This study is a contrastive corpus-based discourse analysis study on the newspaperreports on obesity from Xinmin Evening News and The Times(1998-2020).With Fairclough’sThree-dimensional Analysis Framework and Wodak’s Discourse-historical Approach,thisstudy makes a comparison between these two newspapers from the perspective of keywordanalysis and discursive strategies,adopting quantitative and qualitative analysis.
According to the keyword analysis of reports from Xinmin Evening News and The Times,this study finds that both of them negatively portray obesity since it is believed to be the riskfactor of many chronic and cardiovascular diseases.Xinmin Evening News advocates theformation of healthy lifestyles,especially dietary habits,which demonstrates that individualchoices are supposed to be blame for becoming obesity.Except for personal lifestyles,TheTimes also mentions that the lack of government supervision and the provision of junk foodby food companies can be part of the reason for the increasing obesity rates.As for thesolution to obesity,Xinmin Evening News pays close attention to the prevention of obesitysince taking preventive measures is much more appreciated in traditional Chinese culture.While The Times gives priority to the treatment of obesity due to characteristics of the BritishNational Health Service.
reference(omitted)
