A Corpus-Based Discourse-Historical Analysis of China- related Coverage of COVID-19 in Chinese and American Mainstream Media

Through employing Ruth Wodak's discourse-historical approach, one of the most influential schools of Critical Discourse Analysis, as the guiding theory, the paper conducted a corpus-based study on China-related coverage of COVID-19 in Chinese and American mainstream media. With the help of the various functions of the corpus such as concordance, word clusters, keyword list, and so on, both qualitative and quantitative research methods are adopted to explore the changes in the focus of Chinese and American media in different periods and their respective discursive strategies. It is hoped that by combining synchronic research with diachronic research, this paper can effectively explore the deep-rooted reasons behind such differences and changes, and provide insights for the high-quality construction of China's national image.