| Author: | Wu, Yuxi |
| Title: | Media representations of Macau's gaming industry in greater China : a corpus-based critical discourse analysis |
| Advisors: | Cheng, Winnie (ENGL) |
| Degree: | DALS |
| Year: | 2019 |
| Subject: | Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations Critical discourse analysis Critical discourse analysis -- Social aspects English newspapers -- Language Gambling industry -- China -- Macau (Special Administrative Region) |
| Department: | Faculty of Humanities |
| Pages: | ix, 344 pages : color illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | The present study aims to compare media representations of Macau's gaming industry in three English-language newspapers published in the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong SAR and Macau SAR, which are territories of the Greater China Region in order to find out to what extent different ideologies and stances are represented by newspapers published in different territories in China. It combines critical discourse analysis (CDA), on the basis of the notion of "language as discourse and as social practice" (Fairclough, 2001, p. 21) and corpus linguistics (CL). Three news article corpora, namely Xinhua News & China Daily Corpus (XH&CDC), South China Morning Post Corpus (SCMPC) and Macau Post Daily Corpus (MPDC) were compiled for the study. To address the research aim, the study analysed and contrasted frequent lexical words in each news article corpus based on Sinclair's (2004) model of five categories of co-selection of the lexical item. The top trigrams of the corpora were also examined and compared. Finally, key semantic field analysis was conducted. To achieve the above analysis, two corpus tools were employed in this study. Wordsmith 7.0 (Scott, 2016) was used to generate single lexical wordlists and trigrams wordlists, and Wmatrix (Rayson, 2008) was adopted to identify the key semantic fields in each corpus. Findings reveal that the newspapers published in the three regions represented Macau's gaming industry in different ways, revealing different ideologies and stances. Specifically, XH&CD (Chinese Mainland) paid more attention to report the astonishing social development and economic achievements of Macau over the last 15 years since its handover to China, displaying a positive stance towards Macau's future. In addition, both media agencies attempted to construct Macau SAR as a "good example" of practising "One Country, Two Systems", particularly in comparison to their reporting of some controversial issues that happened in Hong Kong. However, the gaming industry of Macau was not emphasised by the Chinese Mainland media. By comparison, SCMP, a Hong Kong press, reported the Macau's gaming industry in a more comprehensive way, with a special interest in the financial aspects and economic situations of Macau's gaming industry. SCMP also reported some relevant illegal activities related to Macau's gaming industry, which cannot be found in the other two corpora. Findings indicate that SCMP held a very pessimistic attitude towards Macau's economic situation in 2014 by using language with a negative tone and negative metaphors. MPD, as a regional press of Macau, focused on such local issues and affairs of Macau's gaming industry as the casino employees' benefits, working environment and so on, as well as the social influence of gaming on Macau society. The findings of this study indicate differences in the media representations of Macau' s gaming industry in the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong SAR and Macau SAR. The differences between these media representations are reflected through analysing frequent lexical items, trigrams and key semantic fields at the micro-level. These help to reveal the social, political and ideological diversities among these three territories at the macro-level. The present study is the first linguistic study that combines CL and CDA to examine the media representations of Macau's gaming industry. It provides valuable insights into ideological differences in different news media in different territories of the Greater China Region. It makes important theoretical, methodological and practical implications for the media and researchers in their investigations into and the reporting of media discourse. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | restricted access |
Files in This Item:
| File | Description | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 991022214658603411.pdf | For All Users (off-campus access for PolyU Staff & Students only) | 1.94 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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