Van Dijk advances the development of CDA by his analysis of news discourses in many languages。 His earlier works focus on literary studies and text grammar。 Since the late 1980s, he turns to media discourse。 His interest is in developing a theoretical model that will explain cognitive discourse processing mechanisms。 In News Analysis (1988), he integrates general theory of discourse to the discourse of news, and applies his theory to authentic case study of news reports at home and abroad。 He has developed a cognitive model for CDA and concentrated the interpretation of text in a psychological perspective。 His main contribution is a framework for analyzing the discourse structure of news reports。 His approach for analyzing ideologies has three parts: social analysis, cognitive analysis, and discourse analysis。 Later, he shifts his attention to the relations between power, language and ideology in news discourse and political discourse。 He tries to show that we should not take discourse as the end product。
Wodak published the book entitled Critical Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis in 1995。 In this book, she develops an approach she called the discourse historical method。 In 1999, Wodak and Ludwig publish their book entitled Challenges in a Changing World: Issues in Critical Discourse Analysis。 According to Wodak and Ludwig, language manifests social process and interaction and constitutes those processes as well。 Recently, Wodak focuses her attention mainly on political issues as her book The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean published in 2013。
From the review of foreign counries’ critical news studies, it is found that most of them are connected with mind-controlling。 However, topics are seldom narrowed down to the specific event presidential election in which news reports are essential to shape the images of the nominees and spread their political ideas。 The more important is that the media’s influence would no doubt affect the election result which matters a lot to the whole country。
In China, there are also many scholars whose works have profoundly contributed to the development of CDA。 In 1995, Chen Zhongzhu discusses in great details the five development periods of CDA since its birth to the latest development tendency in his article An Introduction and Evaluation to Critical Linguistics。 He also discusses the relations between language, discourse and context and introduces transitivity system and interpersonal system by examples。 文献综述
Xin Bin is an eminent figure in critical news analysis at home。 Xin published his article Language, Power and Ideology: Critical Linguistics in 1996。 This is an introductory article to critical linguistics which illustrates the development of CDA, its philosophical and theoretical basis, and its analytical tools。 In his work, he makes comparative studies on news reports from different newspapers reporting the same event, employing such analytical tools as nominalization, classification, tense and voice, modality and speech reporting。
Wang Qingxin and Ji Weining (2001) conduct an analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on the basis of the three dimensional framework proposed by Fairclough and draw on functional grammar as a linguistic tool。 They relate the three steps of analysis: description, interpretation and explanation to the three meta-functions of language put forward by Halliday correspondingly。
Xu Lixin (1999) makes a contrastive study of four newspapers’ accounts on Indian nuclear test。 He analyzes the headline, lead and contents of the reports from the perspectives of transitivity, modality and wordings。 His study is both a quantitative and qualitative one。 His case study leads to the conclusion that language is a reflex of ideology。
It can be learned from the above review that CDA addresses social problems。 News discourse, as a social practice and representation of ideological meanings and power asymmetry, attracts the attention of critical researchers around the world。