Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 19, Issue 2, 2009

By combining the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach with the corpus linguistic method, this study compares the lexical choices employed by two English newspapers, i.e. the China Daily (CD) and the China Post (CP), in their coverage of Taiwan’s KMT (Kuomintang) Chairman Lien Chan’s visit to China in April 2005. The comparative analysis of the two corpora of news reports is conducted at three levels: word frequencies, part-of-speech (POS) frequencies and semantic category frequencies. The paper argues that the differences in the news representation of Lien’s visit are attributed to the different socio-political functions performed by these two newspapers: while the CD depicts the event as a momentous one that has received nation-wide plaudits in order to echo faithfully China’s policy of peaceful reunification, the CP presents a more comprehensive picture of the event in that it also reports in detail some incidents, including violent protests, triggered by Lien’s visit that has great impact on the domestic social life of Taiwan.

From the perspective of critical discourse analysis, the present study reveals, both qualitatively and quantitatively, that there has emerged a trend of discursive democratization in the New Year’s editorials in the People’s Daily. This emerging trend is signaled by the reduction of explicit power markers such as the modalities, the negative linguistic items of Judgment and by the increase of implicit power markers of positive linguistic items of Appreciation in Appraisal system. We suggest that discursive democratization in these editorials is the result of the restructuring of both institutional and societal orders of discourse in mainland China; however, the trend of discursive democratization is only conditional and rather limited under the current political system.

The present study aims to unveil the changing ideologies in contemporary China from a micro discursive perspective, focusing on a case study of the changing advertising discourses in Nanfang Daily, a typical Communist Party newspaper in Guangdong province, P. R. China. Advertising discourse has long been considered as a socio-cultural artifact and most of the previous researches are confined to its socio-cultural functions. By taking a broader ideological perspective, the present study adopts the fundamental principle of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and developed an integrated framework, which links the value appeals and linguistic practice with an investigation of the different power groups having access to the advertising discourses in two different socio-historical settings of China — 1980 versus 2002. It is found that the danwei-dominated advertising discourses in 1980 were characterized by the prevalent use of utilitarian values and by the rare use of interactive lexico-grammatical features. In 2002, in sharp contrast, the individual-consumption dominated advertising discourses manifested itself with an escalated use of hedonistic value appeals and of interactive linguistic features. The changes in value appeals and linguistic practices reflect that different power groups in the advertising discourses have different needs and interests in the specific socio-historical settings. Finally, the study places the research findings within the landscape of the hybridized and competing ideologies in China and in the accelerated globalization.

This study aims to explore discursive changes in current Taiwanese society, with a particular focus on code-mixing in newspaper headlines. Data were collected from three major newspapers catering to different readerships during three time periods (i.e. 1985, 1995, and 2005). The language of Taiwanese newspaper is hybrid and heterogeneous in that local dialect (i.e. Southern Min), English, Japanese, Cantonese, and even Zhuyin (Mandarin Phonetic Symbols) are included in Mandarin news headlines. My analysis has found that over the past two decades, there has been an increase of code-mixing in all three newspapers, In addition, a cross-sectional comparison has revealed that soft news texts (e.g. entertainment news) contain more instances of code-mixing than hard news texts (e.g. political and international news). I argue that this increasing linguistic hybridization found in Taiwanese media texts is not only linked with the indigenization, globalization, marketization, and technologization in current Taiwanese society. More importantly, since language use is a kind of identity-constructing devices, this ongoing discursive change also reflects an emerging new Taiwan identity, which can be characterized by multilingualism, multiculturalism, and multiple identities.

This study explores how “New Taiwanese” was offered and constructed as a viable identity category for people in Taiwan through the news discourse of the United Daily News (UDN) referenced in 922 news reports between 1987 and 2007. From the term’s first appearance in 1987, its promulgation as official discourse by the KMT government primarily between 1998 and 2000, to the end of 2007, “New Taiwanese” as an identity project (Laitin, 1998) has been utilized and challenged by political players of various camps at different junctures to achieve their political agenda. It has also gradually transformed its references and modified its meanings to join in the construction of Taiwan’s national identity. As a mediating concept for “Taiwanese” and “Chinese,” “New Taiwanese” has maintained a precarious and ambivalent positioning, having to constantly adjust to shifting ethnic relations of Taiwanese people and their complex, in-flux array of national identifications.

In this paper messages from viewers of the popular Korean historical TV drama — Dae Jang Geum (Da Chang Jin) — in a Hong Kong web-based discussion forum are analyzed to see how some Hong Kong viewers construct their Chinese cultural identities through discursive moves of positioning (Harrè and van Langenhove, 1999). Different subject positions are adopted by these forum discussion participants to draw, maintain, and shift the boundary between “self” and “other” in different storylines projected in their messages. In asserting their Chinese cultural identities they also seem to be engaged in discursive construction of cultural others (e.g. Japanese, Koreans). We problematize these constructions as double-edged in their possible consequences: while they seem to cultivate a sense of Chinese cultural solidarity (albeit only temporarily), they also show the danger of constructing a hegemonic Sino-centric discourse of Great China culturalism. The cultural identification patterns of these Hong Kong viewers also seem to be unstable, ambivalent and contradictory, perhaps reflecting Hong Kong people’s general sense of ambivalence and fluidity in their negotiation of cultural identities.

This study investigates a type of online language play popularized on the Taiwan-based Internet, including the rendering in Chinese characters of the sounds of Taiwanese and Taiwan Guoyu (Taiwanese-accented Mandarin), which are defined as Stylized Taiwanese and Stylized Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, respectively. The playfulness inherent in these stylized practices has multiple sources. First, they manipulate the Chinese writing system and create an incongruity between sound and meaning. Second, they call attention simultaneously to a number of functions of language (Jakobson, 1960). Third, the two stylized practices bring into play the respective social meanings and stereotypes associated with their spoken counterparts. Thus the superficially similar forms of language play may be interpreted differently and further serve subtly different interactional functions in face-threatening situations. Two cases of stylized practices are examined in detail to illustrate how stylized language play is used to mitigate potential tension, to show positive affect, and to regulate appropriate group behaviors simultaneously.