Transitive representations of China’s image in the US mainstream newspapers: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis

Abstract

This article introduces a corpus-based critical discourse analysis to explore how this linguistically oriented approach can be a helpful complement to the journalism studies of national image and beyond. It demonstrates how to use this approach to examine how China’s image is represented in three US mainstream newspapers published between 2008 and 2010. It is achieved by drawing on a linguistic framework of transitivity and taking statistical measures of collocation to exhaustively identify the recurrent transitive patterns of ‘who does what to China’ in a self-built corpus and then making an in-depth analysis of the extended concordance lines accordingly. Findings show that China’s image is represented as being related to seven participant roles: the Persuaded, the Criticized, the Labeled, the Contained, the Punished, the Helped, and the Praised, which reinforce each other to make certain themes such as economy and trade more salient and represent China in a very negative light.