The aim of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is to reveal how ideologies influence the discourse, and vice versa by studying the linguistic characteristics of the discourse and the specific social, economic, political and historical contexts the discourse itself is based on. As a type of mass media discourse, news plays a more and more important role in the society. It not only conveys the information to the readers, but also influences the attitudes and concepts of the readers by the embedded ideologies. Thus, news discourses evoke much interest of critical linguistics. The present study selects the news reports on the 2010 Diaoyu Islands incident from three newspapers: China Daily, The Japan Times and The New York Times. Based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Systematic Functional Grammar, the present thesis conducts a contrastive critical analysis of news reports in three stages. In response to the research questions, this study has obtained the following findings: The different linguistic features are shown in the three newspapers towards the report on the same event. In the lexical choices, the three newspapers report differently from three perspectives, i.e., the description of the incident location, the description of the cause of the incident and the naming of the incident. In the distribution of the processes, verbal process takes the highest percentage both in China Daily and The Japan Times, while material process takes the highest percentage in The New York Times. In the distribution of the news sources, the quotation from its own authorities takes the highest percentage both in China Daily and The Japan Times, while the quotation from all walks of Japan takes the highest percentage in The New York Times. Besides that, news sources from Chinese experts and scholars in China Daily take a high proportion; and a large number of news sources from American authorities are detected in The Japan Times. Different linguistic features reflect different ideologies embedded in the three newspapers. And the main reason for that is the difference of politics, history and culture existing in the three countries. Accordingly, news discourse, especially political news discourse could not only reflect the dominant ideology, but also serve to convey the ideology to influence or even change the reader’s understanding of the events reported in the newspapers.

Lanlan Wei. A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis of English News Reports on 2010 Diaoyu Island Incident in Chinese, Japanese and American Newspapers. The Frontiers of Society, Science and Technology (2021) Vol. 3, Issue 8: 36-47. https://doi.org/10.25236/FSST.2021.030808.

[1] Bell, A. (1991). The Language of News Media[M]. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

[2] Bennett, W. Lance. (1983). News: The Politics of Illusion[M]. New York: Longman.

[3] Calhoun, C. (1995). Critical Social Theory[M]. Oxford: Blackwell.

[4] Chen, Z.Z.(1995). Review of Critical Linguistics[J]. Foreign language teaching and research, (1). 21-27

[5] Chouliaraki, L. & Fairclough, N. (1999). Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

[6] Curran, J. ( 2002). Media and Power[M]. London: Routledge.

[7] Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and Power[M]. London: Longman.

[8] Fairclough, N. (1992a). Discourse and Social Change[M]. Cambridge: Polity Press.

[9] Fairclough, N. (1992b). Critical Language Awareness[M]. London: Longman.

[10] Fairclough, N. (1995a). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language[M]. London: Longman.             

[11] Fairclough, N. (1995b). Media Discourse[M]. London: Edward Armold. 

[12] Fairclough, N. & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical Discourse Analysis[M]. In Van Dijk, T. A., Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction, Volume II: Discourse as Social Interaction[M]. pp.258-284. London: Sage. 

[13] Fedler, F. (1989). Reporting for the Print Media[M]. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

[14] Fishman, M. (1980). Manufacturing the News[M]. Austin: University of Texas Press.

[15] Hodge, B., Kress, G. & Trew, T. (1979). Language and Control[C]. London: Routledge.

[16] Fowler, R. (1986). Linguistic Criticism[M]. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[17] Fowler R. (1991). Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press [M]. Routledge: London and New York. 

[18] Hall, S. (1980). Culture, Media, Language[M]. London: Hutchinson.

[19] Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar[M]. London: Edward Arnold.

[20] Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). An Introduction to Functional Grammar[M]. London: Edward Arnold.

[21] Halliday, M. A. K. (2000). An Introduction to Functional Grammar[M]. Beijing: Foreign language Teaching and Research Press.

[22] Hatim, B. (2001). Communication Across Cultures [M]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.  

[23] Hodge, R. & Kress, G. (1988). Social Semiotics[M]. Cambridge: Cornell University Press.

[24] Hodge, R. & Kress, G. (1993). Language as Ideology[M]. London: Routledge.

[25] Ji, Y.H. (2001). Critical discourse analysis: Theory and method [J]. Journal of Xiamen University, (3). 149-155.

[26] Mencher, Melvin. (1994). News Reporting and Writing[M]. Madison/ Wisconsin. Dubuque/ Iowa: Brown & Benchmark Publishers.

[27] Mills, S. (2002). Post-feminist text analysis. In Michael Toolan (Ed.), Critical Discourse Analysis-Critical Concepts in Linguistics[A]. Routledge.

[28] Ohara, Y. (2002). Ideology of language and gender: a critical discourse analysis of Japanese prescriptive texts. In Michael Toolan (Ed.), Critical Discourse Analysis-Critical Concepts in Linguistics[A]. Routledge.

[29] Ren, F. (2002). A Critical Analysis of Syntagmatic Models in News Discourse[J]. Journal of PLA Foreign Language Institute (5). 19-23.

[30] Simpson, P. (1993). Language, Ideology and Point of View[M].London: Routledge.

[31] Scollen, R. (2000). Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach[M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

[32] Theo Van Leeuwen. (2008). Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis[M]. Oxford University Press.

[33] Thompson, J. B. (1984). Studies in the theory of Ideology[M]. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

[34] Thompson, G. (2000). Introducing Functional Grammar[M]. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.

[35] Trumble, W. R. & Stevenson, A. (2004). Oxford English Dictionary[Z]. Oxford Univerisity Press. 

[36] Van Dijk, T. A. (1988a). Handbook of Discourse Analysis[M]. 4 vols. New York: Academic Press.

[37] Van Dijk, T. A. (1988b). News as Discourse[M]. Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

[38] Van Dijk, T. A. (1997). Discourse as Interaction in Society[M]. In SAGE Publications. London: Thousand Oaks.

[39] Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach[M]. London: Sage Publications Ltd. 

[40] Van Dijk, T. A. (2002). Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis. In Michael Toolan (Ed.), Critical Analysis –Critical Concepts in Linguistics[A]. pp.104-141. Routledge.

[41] Van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and Context : A Sociocognitive Approach[M]. Cambridge University Press.

[42] Wodak, R. (1996). Disorders of Discourse[M]. London: Longman.

[43] Wodak, R. and Michael Meyer (2001). Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis[C]. London: Thousand Oaks.

[44] Xin, B. (1998). A critical analysis of reported speech in news reports[J]. Foreign Teaching and Research, (2). 9-14.

[45] Xin, B. (2000a). Critical Linguistics and Critical Analysis of English News Reports[J]. Foreign Teaching and Research, (6). 34-41.

[46] Xin, B. (2000b). Critical Analysis of Intertextuality[M]. Suzhou:Suzhou University Press.

[47] Xin, B. (2006). A Comparative Study of the Distributional and Functional Features of Reported Speech in China Daily and The New York Times[J].Foreign Languages and Foreign Language Teaching (3). 1-4.