Representation of Russia-Ukraine conflict on Mandarin social media: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of posts in Sina Weibo

This dissertation discussed the complex representation of the Russian-Ukrain crisis in Chinese social media to reveal the ideologies and linguistic features of different political stances using a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis method. The analysis consists of two levels. The first is a transitivity analysis of the syntactic structure of clauses to identify the roles allocated to different entities mentioned in the corpus. The second is a comprehensive frequency analysis of lexicogrammatical issues to reveal the linguistic patterns of the representations.

As a result, this dissertation revealed how Russia supporters and Ukraine supporters post under the “positive us” and “negative them” structure of van Dijk (2011). Remarkable differences also appeared on the political affiliation of the users. The second part of this dissertation found that both Russia supporters and Ukraine supporters post positively about certain groups of culture and political tendency.