scholarly journals Corpus Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis: A Case Study on News Reports of the 2011 Libyan Civil War

1969 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-28
Author(s):  
Sibo Chen

This paper reports a comparative analysis of the news coverage of the 2011 Libyan civil war in two national media (China Daily and The New York Times). The 2011 Libyan civil war attracted wide attention and was extensively covered by various media around the world. However, news discourse regarding the war was constructed differently across various news agencies as a result of their clashing ideologies. Based on corpus linguistics methods, two small corpora with a total of 22,412 tokens were compiled and the comparative analyses of the two corpora revealed the following results. First, although the two corpora shared a lot of commonalities in word frequency, differences still exist in several high ranking lemmas. On the one hand, words such as “Qaddafi” and “war” ranked similarly in the two corpora’s lexical frequency lists; on the other hand, the frequencies of the lemma “rebel/rebels” were much higher in The New York Times corpus than in the China Daily corpus, which indicated that the image of the rebel received more attention in the reports by The New York Times than in those by China Daily. Second, although the word “Qaddafi” achieved similar frequencies in the two corpora, a follow-up collocation analysis showed that the images of “Qaddafi” contrasted with each other in the two corpora. In The New York Times corpus, the words and phrases collocating with “Qaddafi” were mainly negative descriptions and highlighted the pressure on Qaddafi whereas many neutral and even positive descriptions of Qaddafi appeared in the China Daily corpus. Based on these findings, the paper further discusses how discursive devices are applied in news coverage of warfare, as well as some methodological implications of the case study (Reprinted by Permission of Canadian Association for the Studies of Discourse and Writing).

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
Yakoub Abu Taha ◽  
Rajai Al-Khanji

The current study aimed at discovering biases through comparing the used journalistic and lexicalizations practices in quotations patterns and representations of social actors in news coverage of the Gaza Marches of Return. The selected newspapers were The Guardian, the New York Times, The Jordan Times and Haaretz. The study sample comprised 32 news articles and 8 editorials. The findings of the study revealed that more space was given to Israeli political and military actors over their Palestinian counterparts in the New York Times and Haaretz. The Guardian and the Jordan Times quotations of Palestinian civilian actors focused on human suffering and casualties themes while Haaretz and the NYT quoted them instigating deadly attacks among other themes. The use of negative themes along with negative speakers’ descriptions of Palestinian political actors revealed biased stances against Palestinian Civilian Actors. In addition, the used reporting verbs, unbalanced quotations distributions and word counts of social actors’ quotations pointed at biased practices and adoption of one party narrative in the case of the NYT, Haaretz and the Jordan Times. 


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Kuizi Ma ◽  
Ya Xiao

In recent years, as China’s largest smartphone company, Huawei’s position in the international market has gradually increased and received widespread attention from foreign media. The rapid development of China’s impact on the hegemony of the US has also changed the direction of US media’s reporting on Chinese companies. At this stage, it is meaningful to study the image of Huawei in both Chinese and US media reports. Therefore, based on the corpus approach and critical discourse analysis, this paper builds two corpora of China Daily (576 reports with 438,261 words) and The New York Times (429 reports with 347,025 words). It is found that (1) both sides acknowledge that Huawei ranks top in world telecommunication technology, particularly in the 5G network; (2) two newspapers focus on different aspects in their reports. For the Chinese media, Huawei’s technological prowess, innovation capacity in the global market, cooperation with many other European and African countries are given more attention, while for the American media, more focus is shifted to Huawei’s threat to national security; (3) two newspapers hold different attitudes towards the rise of Huawei. China Daily’s positive construction of Huawei’s image is obvious. While for the American media, the Trump administration is more likely to project a threatening image of Huawei; (4) the reporting frameworks and the styles of materials selected differ in two newspapers. China Daily’s framework concentrates on “Huawei” itself, while The New York Times tends to construct a reporting framework from multiple perspectives from the third-party.


2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 372-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie Matthews

The Great East Japan Disaster of 2011 provides an important case study to evaluate how western media cover Japan. Employing a critical discourse analysis of coverage in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Observer this article seeks to examine how Japan and the disaster-affected communities of Tohoku were represented through the context of this disaster. The analysis revealed the presence of a cultural framework, enacted during the response phase of the disaster news cycle to explain how people in Japan were coping in the aftermath of the disaster, which was premised on a discourse of cultural otherness. The textual elements that underwrote this discourse included a tendency to draw on stereotypes and in the way culture was employed to provide context to individual stories. The analysis also acknowledges how forms of bias circulated through other discourses, in particular when covering the nuclear crisis at Fukushima. The article argues that this discourse of cultural otherness is, in part, attributable to the features of disaster journalism, rather than a lack of familiarity on the part of journalists with the cultural context.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Dan Zhang

This study examines the discursive construction of South China Sea dispute in China Daily and The New York Times from April 2016 to December 2017. Drawing on Van Dijk’s account of critical discourse analysis and the linguistic framework of Appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), this study investigates how three social actors in the dispute, namely China, United States, Philippines, are differently constructed with the strategic use of attitude resources in the two newspapers. The corpus analyzed consists of 45 newspaper texts from China Daily and 49 newspaper texts from The New York Times. The analysis reveals competing discursive construction of social actors that constitute positive us-representation and negative other-representation in the two newspapers. For example, China Daily constructs China as a peace-loving country, insisting on the peaceful means and the cooperation with ASEAN and other claimant countries to resolve the dispute, whereas The New York Times depicts China as threat, hegemony and provocation. Such competing discursive construction not only reflects the ideological stance of two newspapers, but also functions to legitimize their countries’ policies and decisions in the South China Sea dispute.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174804852098744
Author(s):  
Ke Li ◽  
Qiang Zhang

Media representations have significant power to shape opinions and influence public response to communities or groups around the world. This study investigates media representations of Islam and Muslims in the American media, drawing upon an analysis of reports in the New York Times over a 17-year period (from Jan.1, 2000 to Dec. 31, 2016) within the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis. It examines how Islam and Muslims are represented in media coverage and how discursive power is penetrated step by step through such media representations. Most important, it investigates whether Islam and Muslims have been stigmatized through stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination. The findings reveal that the New York Times’ representations of Islam and Muslims are negative and stereotypical: Islam is stereotyped as the unacclimatized outsider and the turmoil maker and Muslims as the negative receiver. The stereotypes contribute to people’s prejudice, such as Islamophobia from the “us” group and fear of the “them” group but do not support a strong conclusion of discrimination.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Janayna Ávila

This article reflects on the issue of the refugees from four photographs of the series Exodus by Brazilian photographer Mauricio Lima, published on the North American newspaper The New York Times and Pulitzer winner in 2016. Its main objective is to analyze the boundaries between the duty of contemporary photojournalism and the obtainmentof images of refugees. For that, we used as theoretical reference reflections proposed by Appadurai, Bauman, Martínez, Sontag, Shore, Rouillé and Zanforlin. Methodologically, we worked with qualitative research and case study from the analysis of the images and bibliographic research. As a result, it is considered that Lima’s images bring original expressive dimension and seek personal interactions to build profound narratives.


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