Title: A Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of News Reports on the Meng Wanzhou Case from People’s Daily and Voice of America
Stream: Language. Literature and Linguistics
Presentation Type: Virtual Poster Presentation
Authors:
Manru Zhang, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China
Abstract:
This paper presents a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of news reports on the Meng Wanzhou case, the arrest of a Chinese tech giant's Chief Financial Officer. It aims to examine how the Chinese and American mainstream media describe this event linguistically, what hidden messages they convey behind words, and how they manipulate their readers implicitly. Two corpora were created from news texts of People's Daily (English-version) and Voice of America, from 2018 when Meng was arrested to 2021 when she was released. This analysis reveals that while the official Chinese press draws upon linguistic strategies such as transitivity, vagueness and lexical choice to emphasize Meng's innocence and evoke people's patriotism and sympathy towards Meng, the American press employs language by using passive voice, nominalization and referential choice to construct Meng as an upper-class professional who was accused of crimes but faced no serious punishment. Based on the findings, this paper uncovers different ideological positions upheld by China and America, and the antagonistic relationship between these two countries.
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