ZHUOYA WANG (NORTHWESTERN POLYTECHNICAL UNIVERSITY)

A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE INTERNATIONAL REPORTS ON CHINESE “CHUNYUN” IN 2024 : LINGUISTICS, DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, AND RELATED AREAS

Spring festival travel rush, commonly known as ‘chunyun’, refers to a period of transport in China mainland with high traffic load around the Lunar New Year, which represents a unique Chinese cultural phenomenon and an important symbol of social development. In the past decade, news discourse has been a popular research field of critical discourse analysis (CDA). As an annual hot topic in Chinese mass media, ‘chunyun’ truly describes a living picture of Chinese people and takes on distinctive characteristics of nations and times, so it is an excellent research object for CDA. This study selects the latest chunyun-related reports from the overseas edition of newspaper China Daily to build a small corpus, extracts data with the help of software and adopts Fairclough’s three-dimensional model to analyze it. This model examines the discourse from three aspects, text, discursive practice and social practice. Text analysis includes titles, keywords and collocations while discursive practice analysis contains information sources and report modes of the news discourse. Through the exploration of these linguistic features, it is found that in the aspect of social practice, Chinese mainstream media actively constructs external discursive system and shapes an image of a people-oriented, technologically advanced, open and inclusive China to the international world.

Wang Zhuoya received bachelor degree in English from Northwestern Polytechnical University in 2023. She is currently working towards the master degree in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics in Foreign Languages with the School of Foreign Studies, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Shannxi, China.