A study on the Legitimation Strategy of CBS Evening News coverage of COVID-19 in the United States CBS晚间新闻关于美国新冠疫情报道的合法化策略研究开题报告

1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述包含参考文献）

1.introductionstudies on legitimation showed the relation between language, power and ideology, like how ideology is contained in language, and how language is severed to power. through the process of building ideology in language, legitimacy is always established and cultivated. legitimation, the process of building legitimacy, is undoubtedly with great importance.1.1 research backgroundlegitimation, as one of the most extensively discussed topics in politics, is always constructed when power tries to manipulate the publics ideology through language. research in this field (van dijk 2005, oddo 2011, lin 2016) analyzes how authoritative group or power uses language to build legitimacy to construct publics ideology.speakers are often described as engaging in legitimation as members of one institution, and especially as occupying a particular role or position. legitimation in that case is a discourse which can justify 'official' action in terms of the rights or duties, politically, socially or legally associated with that role or position. indeed, the act of legitimation entails that an institutional actor believes or claims to respect official norms, and hence to remain within the prevalent moral order. critical discourse analysis (cda) emerged from critical linguistics in the 1970s. the publication of faircloughs language and power marks the beginning of cda. cda subsumes a variety of approaches towards the social analysis of discourse (fairclough, wodak, mulderrig 2005). it aims to reveal the relationship between language, power, and ideology, and to find out how power uses language to convince the audience to believe and to accept its ideology. when power tries to manipulate the publics mind, language is an important tool to do that. in the process of constructing ideology, language is used to legitimize or delegitimize peoples behaviors. this approach is the well-known global semantic strategies of positive self-presentation of us and negative other-presentation of them. by presenting the good image of us and bad image of them, we have the right to prevent their action and our action is legitimized. in terms of research topics, cda focuses on social issues and political events, including gender discrimination, racial discrimination, employment and judicial inequalities, war, nuclear weapons, political strategies and business practices (xin 2005).cbs, founded in 1927 in new york, now has developed to chicago, los angeles, philadelphia, st. louis and other cities, with 7 directly affiliated television stations, and there are 200 affiliated television stations in the country, the formation of a national broadcast network. the evening news, cbs's flagship program, airs at 6 p.m. every night and is broadcast to a nationwide audience.the cbs evening news began in 1948. the news program has been broadcast for nearly 70 years. it is broadcast at 18:30 every night in the united states. at the beginning of the program, walter cronkite, the famous anchor, positioned the program as a serious and thought-provoking news program with critical comments, and the news topics were major national and international events. based on the interests and rights of the majority of the population, the program shows an upright and critical style. the anchors' words and images are authoritative, qualified, accurate and sharp in language expression, and they have enough life experience and experience to have an objective attitude and judgment on some highly controversial news events. cbs news anchors can better highlight people's control and selection of programs, and reflect the wisdom and logic of anchors rather than simply talking and chatting. news anchors like scott pelley can often guide the public opinion of the national audience and become the elite group in the american society.from october to december 2020, cbs evening news made many reports about the epidemic in the united states, and the news language used in these reports was more or less legitimizing stance and intention.1.2 need of the study in terms of research theory, most research on legitimation is based on sociology and from the perspective of cognition and phycology. they revealed the relationship among language, power and ideology, a key issue in cda. most of them began with the concept of legitimacy, and few scholars used a systematic analytical framework of discursive legitimation strategies. that is to say, although such studies have advanced our understanding of legitimacy, they have not gone very far in our understanding of the process of building legitimacy. in terms of research method, previous research is mostly based on only several texts. different from such studies, this thesis combined the methods of corpus linguistics with discourse analysis, building a corpus of more than 100,000 words and analyzing the construction of legitimation in a large number of discourse. based on van leeuwens (2008) legitimation strategies and van dijks (1998, 2005) legitimation theory, this thesis combines the discursive analysis with methods in corpus linguistics to reveal the process of constructing legitimation in the coverage of cbs evening news about the epidemic in america. at present, few scholars have studied the construction of legalization strategy of news reporting. there have been relevant studies on news usage, including news headlines and advertising terms, and news terms in formal mainstream media news reporting programs are also a key point worth paying attention to. although the legitimation strategy is generally used in political discourse, it is also worth studying and analyzing the news discourse used by some relatively official news reporting programs that can indicate national political attitudes.in this study, through the analysis of the text version of the phonetic transcription of the evening news report, it is hoped that the attitudes held by the main stream could be shown.2.literature reviewdifferent from a system, or a notion that legitimacy is, maurer (1971) considered legitimation as a process that the system of power justified its action. from the hierarchical, explicitly evaluative cast of legitimacy, he asserted that legitimation is the process whereby an organization justify to a peer or superordinate system its right to exist (maurer 1971: 361).2.1 definitions of legitimationas a common phenomenon in todays society and an important direction of social politics, legitimation is usually analyzed in cda. although legitimation is usually studied from the perspective of philosophy and politics, van dijk (1998) argued that legitimation is much less studied in discourse analysis. he and martin-rojo (1997) defined legitimation as the act of attributing acceptability to social actors, actions and social relations within the normative order, in contexts of controversial actions, accusations, doubts, critique or conflict over groups relations, domination and leadership. they defined legitimation from discourse research, in which legitimation is more related to the act of reasoning within norms. realizing the prominent function of language and discourse, van dijk further defined legitimation in a discourse analytical framework or pragmatically and asserted (1998) that legitimation was related to the speech act of defending oneself in that one of its appropriateness conditions was often that the speaker was providing good reasons, grounds or acceptable motivations for past or present action that had been or could be criticized by others. he regarded legitimation as discourse in which providing reason was needed to defend ones action. based on van dijks definition, oddo (2011) further defined legitimation as discourse that explained and justified social activity, and typically involved providing good reasons, ground, or acceptable motivations for past or present action. when studying the legitimation constructed in discourse, van leeuwen (2008), however, gives an explicit explanation to legitimation. he argued legitimation was the answer to the spoken or unspoken why questions, why should we do this? or why should we do this in this way? in order to solve the problems that legitimation faces today and analyze the construction of legitimation in discourse, he proposed four categories of legitimation, namely authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization and mythopoesis, which advanced the following research on discursive legitimation strategies (barros 2014; ristics 2015; lin gong 2018). 2.2 theoretical frameworksthere are many theoretical frameworks for discourse analysis of legitimation strategies, among which van dijk's definition and van leeuwen's classification are commonly used. this study is mainly based on these two theories, and the text analysis is mainly based on van leeuwen' framework.2.2.1 van leeuwens legitimation strategiesdifferent from previous understanding of legitimation, van leeuwen defined legitimation in a different way. he thinks that legitimation is answer to why should we do this? or why should we do this in this way?(2009: 105). a legitimation framework is set out in order to answer the why question. in the hope that legitimation will be of use both for critically analyzing the construction of legitimation in discourse and, more generally, for reflecting on the problems that legitimation faces today, van leeuwen (2008) divided legitimation into four major categories, namely authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization and mythopoesis.these forms of legitimation can occur separately or in combination. they can be used to legitimize, but also to de-legitimize, to critique. they can occupy the best part of specific instances of text and talk which may hardly refer to what it is that is being legitimized, or they can be thinly sprinkled across detailed descriptive or prescriptive accounts of the practices and institutions they legitimize. and they are all realized by specific linguistic resources and configurations of linguistic re-sources. in this article, i will describe these resources and the different types of legitimation they express, in the hope that this will be of use both for critically analysing the construction of legitimation in discourse, and, more generally, for reflection on the problems that face legitimation today.2.3.2 van dijks legitimation theoryin sum, ideologies form the basic principies of group-internal legitimation. they do so by specifying the ideological categories of membership criteria, the activities, the goals, the social position, the resources (or power base) as well as the norms and values for each group. these norms and values not only regulate and organize the actions of group members, but also may be used to justify (or indeed to challenge) the social position of the group in relation to other groups. it is at this point where ideology and legitimation interact most specifically, in the control of inter-group relations, such as those of power, dominance and resistance.van dijk (1998, 2005) proposed the well-known global semantic strategies of positive self-presentation of us and negative other-presentation of them. we represent the western democracies that fight against terrorism or rogue states, and they are the terrorists or states that threaten us. by referring to the good images of us and bad images of them, legitimation of our actions is gradually constructed and, on the contrary, their actions are delegitimized. such semantic polarization may be rhetorically emphasized in the usual way (e.g., by hyperboles and metaphors about our good things and their bad things) (van dijk 2005). these overall semantic and rhetorical strategies of ingroup and outgroup polarization are quite general, and also dependent on the political functions of discourse. that is to say, government typically presents their own policies and actions in a positive light, while the opposite is negatively described or condemned. although socio-political manipulation is usually ideological, and manipu-lative discourses often feature the usual ideological polarization patterns at all levels of analysis, the discursive structures and strategies of manipulation cannot simply be reduced to those of any other ideological discourse. indeed, we may have social-political discourses that are persuasive but not manipulative, such as persuasive parliamentary debates or a discussion in a newspaper or on television.2.3 overview of previous studies based on previous research on legitimation (suchman 1995; rojo van dijk 1998; van leeuwen 2008), more scholars gave their own definition of legitimation. lorenzo-dus and marsh (2012) viewed legitimation as the characteristic of being legitimized by being placed within a framework through which something was viewed as right and proper. they defined legitimation from its characteristic, while reyes defined legitimation from its discursive process. reyes (2011) argued legitimation as the process by which speakers accredited or licensed a type of social behavior. he argued it as a justification of a behavior. to make further explanation, he (2011) proposed the process of legitimization was enacted by argumentation, that is, by providing arguments that explained our social actions, ideas, thoughts, declarations, etc. in addition, the act of legitimizing or justifying was related to a goal, which, in most cases, sought our interlocutors support and approval. similar to lorenzo-dus and marsh definition of legitimization, kirkland and wood (2016) defined legitimization as empirical process through which the authority of an institution was discursively constructed and conferred. research on discursive construction of legitimation is an import topic in cda. research in this field focuses on controversial social issues such as war (van dijk 2005; pang 2013), immigration (rojo cabaniss cameron 2017), government measures (eggeling 2017), and some business issues (zhu mckenna 2012). to reveal the relationships between language, ideology and power, cda tries to find out the way legitimation is constructed in discourse. the research on cda can be divided into eight genres in terms of research approach, namely social-cognitive approach, dialectical relational approach, discourse-historical approach, loughborough school and discursive psychology, and social semiotics. each approach is represented by some famous scholars, for example, social-cognitive approach is represented by van dijk (1998, 2005), and social semiotics by van leeuwen (2004). these scholars in the eight genres provide many methods for legitimation research. membership categorization analysis, a very important approach to analyze language, can clarify the process of establishing identities.this study is mainly based on the framework of van leeuwens legitimation strategies for analysis. in such a national news report program, how to legitimize the construction of news terms to reflect the american mainstream media's views on international events and its attitude toward the handling of such events in america will be the focus of this study.referencescap, p. (2008). towards the proximization model of the analysis of legitimization in political discourse. journal of pragmatics, 40(1), 17-41.cromartie, a. (2003). legitimacy in r. bellamy and a. mason (eds) political con- cepts, new york: palgrave.hester, s. 53.jayyusi, l. (1984). categorisation and moral order. london: routledge.kirkland, c. 513.leudar, i., marsland, v. nekvapil, j. (2004). on membership categorization: us, them and doing violence in political discourse. discourse society, 15(2), 243-266.oddo, j. (2011). war legitimation discourse: representing us and them in four us presidential addresses. discourse society, 22 (3), 287-314.peled-elhanan, n. (2010). legitimation of massacres in israeli school history books. discourse and society, 21(4), 377-404.reyes, a. (2011). strategies of legitimization in political discourse: from words to actions. discourse society, 22(6), 781-807.rojo, l. m. van dijk, t. a. (1997). legitimating the expulsion of illegal migrants in spanish parliamentary discourse. discourse 以《国别反恐报告》为例，《外国语言与文化》，（1）：147-156。

龚双萍、张韧（2018），基于语料库的南海问题美国(去)合法化话语策略研究，《外语研究》，35（1）：13-18。

胡元江、钱露（2019），趋同论视角下政治语篇的合法化研究以白宫发言人涉朝话语为，《外语学刊》，（5）：18-23。

2. 研究的基本内容、问题解决措施及方案

This study intends to use the reports of CBS Evening News, a mainstream media news program in the United States, on the situation related to COVID-19 in the United States from October to December 2020 as the corpus. Based on the legalization strategy of Van Leeuwen (2008) and the legalization theory of Van Dijk (1998, 2005), this paper conducts a research, combining qualitative and quantitative analysis. To explore the distribution, form and function of legalized and illegalized discourse strategies used, and to analyze the attitude and interest needs of the American mainstream media regarding such world health events.This study intends to answer two questions:1. What words did CBS Evening News use to legitimize its coverage of COVID-19 in the US?2. What kinds of legalization strategies are used in CBS Evening News' coverage of COVID-19 in the US? What are they?The data required for this study are subtitled texts of CBS Evening News videos downloaded from the official website, including nearly seventy copies from October to December 2020.About eight classical sentence samples will be selected as the basis for text research, which will be analyzed through careful reading and personal classification.