A Corpus-based Contrastive Study of Online News Reports on Economic Crisis ― A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

Abstract

This paper qualitatively and quantitatively analyzes the English coverage of economic crisis in China Daily and The New York Times from the perspective of critical discourse analysis based on corpus linguistics. A detailed contrastive analysis between China Daily corpus (CDC) and New York Times corpus (NTC) is conducted from various aspects, including concordance analysis and lexical comparison. We arrive at two conclusions: (1) Chinese reports convey the general information about the global economic crisis, whereas American reports seem to be more concerned with the details. (2) Chinese journalists use more neutral expressions to report the causes of the crisis, the impacts of the crisis on China and the attitudes to China's Stimulus Plan, while American media employ more emotional and evaluation-laden words and expressions to convey the information.