Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis Research Articles

Nigerian Media’s Perception of the “One Belt, One Road” Initiative--A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

As the largest economy and a major energy country in Africa, Nigeria formally joined the "the Belt and Road" initiative in 2018, and the cooperation between China and Nigeria based on the initiative has achieved fruitful results. However, there is no research on Nigeria's real understanding of the initiative. Using Transitivity System and the Appraisal Theory as the analysis framework and AntConc and UAM Corps Tool as analysis tools, this paper studies the reports on the "the Belt and Road" by three mainstream media in Nigeria: the National Daily, the Guardian and the Leadership. The study found that most Nigerian media reports showed a positive attitude, but a few reports reflected their misinterpretation of the "the Belt and Road" initiative, which may be affected by the malicious advocacy of western countries.

Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis of China’s National Image in Green Development: A Case Study of the White Paper China’s Green Development in the New Era

Under Martin’s Appraisal Theory, China’s national image in the white paper China’s Green Development in the New Era is studied, based on self-built corpus. The text is studied in terms of the distribution of attitudinal resources. According to the results, a positive national image is circulated in the white paper. Compared to the Chinese version, the English version focuses on external publicity functions, contributing greatly to China’s international status, while the Chinese version concentrates on spreading the country’s policies. Both versions have achieved the expected target for the communication of national image.

China’s Image in the GCC Mainstream English Newspapers: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

ABSTRACT This paper used the corpus-based critical discourse analysis to explore China’s image represented in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) mainstream English newspapers between 2010 and 2020. Findings show that China is usually reported in a very positive light. Cooperation is the main tone of diplomatic relations between China and the GCC. They have signed a series of strategic cooperation agreements and memorandums of understanding to strengthen a comprehensive and long-term bilateral strategic partnership. Moreover, China is depicted as the GCC’s important trading partner, which is very strong in the economic power and plays an important role in the world economic system. A strong economic complementarity and the historical friendly relations between the two sides are the main contributing factors for the positive representations of China in their mainstream English newspapers. However, the stereotyped “China as a Demon” image in the Western media is occasionally constructed in the GCC English newspapers because of the Western news agencies’ domination of the flow of international news through the Arab media and private ownership of the daily newspapers in the GCC states.

Nigerian Media’s Perception of the “One Belt, One Road” Initiative--A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

As the largest economy and a major energy country in Africa, Nigeria formally joined the "the Belt and Road" initiative in 2018, and the cooperation between China and Nigeria based on the initiative has achieved fruitful results. However, there is no research on Nigeria's real understanding of the initiative. Using Transitivity System and the Appraisal Theory as the analysis framework and AntConc and UAM Corps Tool as analysis tools, this paper studies the reports on the "the Belt and Road" by three mainstream media in Nigeria: the National Daily, the Guardian and the Leadership. The study found that most Nigerian media reports showed a positive attitude, but a few reports reflected their misinterpretation of the "the Belt and Road" initiative, which may be affected by the malicious advocacy of western countries.

A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis of CEO Statements in CSR Reports——A Comparative Study of Huawei and Apple

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report is an effective way to promote the management of social responsibility and strengthen internal and external communication. CEO Statement, as the initial and prominent section in CSR reports, can give readers an overview of the whole reports. This paper selects Huawei and Apple as the data source and downloads the CEO statements in CSR reports from the official websites between 2017 and 2021 and build two corpora. The author uses Fairclough’s three-dimensional critical discourse analysis (CDA) mode as framework to analyze text, discourse practice and social practice of the CEO statements. By comparative analysis of CEO statements in Huawei and Apple CSR reports, we can find different features caused by different cultures. The study will provide practical suggestions for Chinese companies when compiling overseas CSR reports.

Review of Wu (2023): Media Representations of Macau’s Gaming Industry in Greater China: A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract Media Representations of Macau’s Gaming Industry in Greater China, written by Yuxi Wu, adopts a corpus-based critical discourse analysis method to compare newspaper media representations of Macau’s gaming industry in 2014 in Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, and Macau, the three regions of China with different historical backgrounds, economic conditions, political systems, and social norms. The topical preferences, attitudinal differences and ideological stances of English-language newspapers published in these three regions are revealed in this research.

Discursive Construction of Delivery Workers in China Daily

This article introduces a corpus-based critical discourse analysis to explore how this linguistically-oriented approach can be a helpful complement to the studies of news discourse and beyond. It demonstrates how to use this approach to examine how China Daily constructs the image of delivery workers between pre-2020 and post-2020. It is achieved by analysis of keywords and collocational network of delivery as well as some of its concordances. Findings show that the image of delivery workers in China Daily has a shift during the two periods, mainly turning the negative into the positive, which helps the public have a better understanding of this occupation and promote their social integration.

A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis of News Reports about China on COVID-19 in The New York Times

In 2019, the COVID-19 has spread around the world and there have been numerous reports about this topic. In fact, these seemingly objective and unbiased news reports contain underlying ideologies and influence readers’ opinions and judgments. During April and July 2020, negative public perceptions of China in the U.S. reached a historical high point. Therefore, this study uses Fairclough’s three-dimensional analysis model as the theoretical framework and Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as the analytical tool, and selects 40 articles from the beginning of April to the end of July 2020 as the research corpus with the help of AntConc 4.0.5 (macOS) 2022, combining qualitative and quantitative research methods. The following key findings emerged from the study. Firstly, The New York Times tends to use negative linguistic elements to portray an arbitrary image of China, but the expression of Sino-U.S. relations is neutral. Secondly, The New York Times tends to use direct quotations in its news coverage, but the quotations tend to be negative in content. Finally, political, economic and cultural aspects have a direct impact on the ideological production of news reports. This thesis contributes to the enrichment of research in the field of critical discourse analysis and enhances the critical awareness of readers.

Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis on AI Policy: A Comparison Between North America and Developing Countries in East Asia

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has undergone a global transformative impact on people’s lives. However, the realm of empirical research focused on AI within applied linguistics remains limited, predominantly dwelling on qualitative rhetoric and narrative analysis. This research aims to fill this gap by shedding light on the discursive constructions of AI policies between North America and developing countries in East Asia based on corpus data. Two corpora are constructed for quantitative study, utilizing keywords, collocates, and concordance analysis, and two dimensions of dialectical-relational approach are adopted to delve into the results. The findings reveals that both EA and NA prioritize AI-related efforts, but EA emphasizes more on economic and societal applications, while NA highlights governmental sectors’ efforts, cooperation with allies, and national security in AI deployment. The results are closely associated with their social context. This nuanced understanding of AI policy research holds significant implications for policymakers, stakeholders, and scholars actively involved in shaping responsible AI regulations and governance practices on an international scale.

Representation of Native English Teachers and Korean English Teachers in Korean English Newspapers: A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

Representation of Native English Teachers and Korean English Teachers in Korean English Newspapers: A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis

Media presentations of Vietnam's cybersecurity law: A comparative approach with corpus-based critical discourse analysis

The study uses corpus-based critical discourse analysis to examine the divergent framing and positioning of cybersecurity issues and Vietnam's Cybersecurity Law by state-sponsored media and international media through topic modeling, bigram and trigram collocation, and concordance analyses. The findings reveal that Vietnam's national media tend to justify the law by emphasizing human-related cyber threats, legitimizing national security, and delegitimizing opposing forces. In contrast, international media outlets focus on providing critical comments, criticism, and real-life events of human rights violations in the country to question and confront the law's legitimacy. The study also analyzes the competitive and tense nature of the discourses, characterized by antagonistic responses between the two media sources.

National identity revisited

Abstract National Identity is a discursively constructed complex entity which can reshape an image of a nation. Even one person powerful enough to be a representative of the whole nation can promote a collective sense of nationality/patriotism and sovereignty of the country in line with social, historical, or most importantly, a versatile geopolitical context. The present study is an illustration of how lexical choices of a particular political figure – the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – identified by specific corpus linguistic research tools in the discourse, defines and emphasizes a national integrity during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis is applied to investigate how a prominent Ukrainian political figure – Volodymyr Zelenskyy discursively constructs national identity in the context of the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war. The research is based on the linguistic scrutiny of presidential video addresses, which are stored at the official presidential website and transcribed in English.

Muslim preachers’ pandemics related discourses within social media: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis

Pandemics have been extensively represented in different discourse genres including journalistic discourse, media discourse, medical discourse, social media discourse, and academic discourse. This study explores the representation of COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey pox in the Arab Muslim preachers’ discourses on Twitter and Facebook. The Muslim preachers’ discourses remain one of the influential discourses that informs the ideology of its believers, as it is largely based on the Islamic authoritative discourses of the Quran and the Hadiths of Prophet Muhammad. The data set of 538 postings was generated through an extended observation of purposively recruited Arab Muslim non-mainstream scholars’ postings on Facebook and Twitter from March 2019 to August 2022. The data were analyzed using corpus-based critical discourse analysis. The twofold analytical lens involving CL and CDA revealed that Muslim preachers frequently used ideological semantic patterns in communicating to the Muslim society at large regarding the pandemics. The utilized semantic patterns emerged as embedded in certain ideological frames established in the Islamic authoritative discourses of the Quran and the Hadiths of Prophet Muhammad. In their ideological representation of the pandemics, Muslim preachers framed the entire three pandemics mostly as the wrath of God. Religious scholars’ postings cannot be considered an account of teaching and preaching; rather, they merely consume and produce Islamic ideology in a way to manipulate and influence Muslims’ knowledge of existing reality by adding new meanings in line with the chosen ideological frames.

A contrastive study on the representation of “Made in China” in Chinese and U.S. newspapers

The label “Made in China” (MIC) is an essential communication tool in the economic rise of China, marking its increasing prominence in international markets with labor-intensive products and also some knowledge-intensive products. This contrastive study adopts a corpus-based critical discourse analysis approach to illustrate how the major English-language newspapers in China and the United States represented MIC between 2006 and 2018. By categorizing the high-frequency noun lemmas in the two corpora of articles on MIC, we identify seven main topics that are shared by Chinese and U.S. newspapers, but differ in frequency and in trends across time. Through examining the collocates and concordances, we find that the overall attitude regarding MIC in U.S. newspapers is more negative than that in Chinese newspapers, where the dominant attitude shifts from negativity to positivity in 2013, while negativity dominates throughout in U.S. newspapers. We argue that the ideological differences evidenced in language patterns reflect the two countries' conflicting economic interests. This study makes a contribution to the existing literature on MIC by aligning with the prior findings of a negative portray of MIC around 2007, primarily due to product safety issues, and addresses a gap by examining the repidly evolving representation of MIC in the 2010s, which is characterized by the intensified trade relations between the two countries.

Negotiating intersubjectivity by interpersonal and appraisal shifts in Chinese-English government press conference interpreting.

This study investigates how interpreting shifts of interpersonal and appraisal resources facilitated the successful negotiation of intersubjectivity at China's premier press conferences (PPCs) from 2016 to 2021. This study conducts a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of interpersonal shifts at the PPCs as defined by systematic functional linguistics. Quantitative results show that the interpreter is strongly inclined to utilize appraisal shifts which enhance (or soften) the positive (or negative) evaluations of the Chinese government in interpreting the journalists' questions and uses shifts to first-person plurals and inclinational modal verbs in interpreting the Chinese Premier's answers. Qualitative results show these shifts facilitate the direct or indirect reproduction of the government's official ideology (especially the notions of solidarity, change, resolution, and people's wellbeing) and the existing power relations between the government, media, and Chinese people (both authority and solidarity). It is concluded that the interpreter displays a strong tendency to use interpersonal shifts to ensure successful negotiation of intersubjectivity at the PPCs by ultimately reproducing the social status quo.

Discursive constructions of Gay(s), Homosexual(s) and Homosexuality in selected Nigerian and South African Newspapers: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis

Same-sex relationship is a critical topic globally, especially as non-heterosexuals often get marginalized both overtly and covertly. Previous studies on same-sex sexualities in the African context have examined the discursive construction of non-heterosexuals, with little attention paid to the comparative reading of how gay people are discursively constructed in two contextually different African countries. Therefore, this study examines the usage patterns of three labels, gay, homosexual, homosexuality, that are commonly used to denote same-sex sexualities in selected Nigerian and South African newspapers. To do so, corpus-based critical discourse analysis is conducted to detect convergence and divergence of such usages since the countries have opposing laws on same-sex relationships. Similar semantic prosodies were found. However, differing prosodic features show that heteronomativity is mainly emphasized in the Nigerian corpus, while this is sometimes challenged in the South African corpus. The overall conclusion is that there could still be some homophobic tendencies in both the Nigerian and South African contexts as shown by the media representations.

Eyes on Media Framing: Study of the Representation on COVID-19 Vaccine News

This research aims to find out how media represent the vaccine news during pandemic. This is related to the use of intensifiers as a measure of the degree of neutrality of news writers. This research is qualitative research supported by the quantification method. The data used is online news about the covid-19 vaccination in January - July 2021. A total of 43.288 words token has been collected online. This research is a corpus-based critical discourse analysis research. Three-Dimensional model by Fairclough is the theory used and applied in this research. The results show that news has the power to control the interpretation of readers and has a direct impact on social conditions. Several strategies were used by the covid-19 vaccination news writers, including the use of amplification (+intensifiers), the use of adjective collocations, and also the use of booster intensifiers. Intensifiers are mostly used to highlight the quality and enhancement of the covid-19 vaccination. This is relevant to the current condition that people are enthusiastic about vaccination programs as a result of media framing, especially news.

Contrasting semantic and sentimental features between Chinese and American economic news discourse in the epidemic era: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis

The COVID -19 pandemic, as a global health emergency, has attracted a great deal of attention from the international community. In this context, China attaches great importance to economic development and news coverage because the economy concerns people's interests, while media coverage of the economy plays a crucial role in influencing citizens' attitudes and even social stability. While researchers from different disciplines are studying the epidemic, such as education, mental health, and vaccines, existing research into the media discourse of COVID-19 is limited, especially regarding its semantic and sentimental features, and it remains unclear whether the coverage of media news in different countries would draw on varying lenses. To this end, this study constructed a corpus of Chinese and American news reports from January 2020 to August 2021 and analyzed the meaning, lexicality, affective polarity, and theme extraction. Our results suggested that the mainstream media in China and the United States show opposite attitudes toward the same economic situation in China. Further, we interpreted this discrepancy in light of the "explanation" component of Fairclough's three-dimensional model. Such inconsistencies could relate to the differences in cultural backgrounds, modes of operation, and news philosophies between the two countries. Thus, by using a corpus-based approach combined with critical discourse analysis (CDA), our study not only broadens the scope of news discourse analysis, but also advances our understandings of the semantic and sentimental features of news coverage during COVID-19 and the possible reasons behind the differences between countries from a more macro perspective.

The Image of Russia in the Russian-Ukrainian War from the Perspective of American Media: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

The Image of Russia in the Russian-Ukrainian War from the Perspective of American Media: A Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

Wherein Could “Yuan” Guilty Be: The Media Image Construction of “X Yuan”—Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis

Wherein Could “Yuan” Guilty Be: The Media Image Construction of “X Yuan”—Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis