News Discourse of the News Reports of Border Conflict between Thailand and Cambodia through Textual Analysis

Abstract

Using textual analysis, this paper investigates the linguistics characteristics used
by Thairath and Bangkok Post, the most popular Thai-language and Englishlanguage
daily newspaper to present news about border conflict between
Thailand and Cambodia. The purpose is to identify linguistic characteristics
employed in the presentation of the government, military and other related parties
to present their standpoint regarding the border conflict from 2011 to 2013 and to
investigate the functions of these characteristics in constructing the news
discourse. The present study adopts John E. Richardson’s textual analysis
progression (2007) to analyze text on two levels: micro-level textual analysis and
macro-level textual analysis. These linguistics characteristics have different
communicative functions to present various standpoints of people presented in
the news. It also helps text producers achieve their aims in influencing and
shaping audience’s perceptions in a negative and non-negative ways regarding
the border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia.