Media Representations of Macau’s Gaming Industry in Greater China

Book excerpt: This book is the first linguistic study that combines CL and CDA to compare the media representations of Macau’s gaming industry in English-language newspapers published in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau. An analytical framework based on the notion of the extended units of meaning of a lexical item (Sinclair, 2004) is adopted to examine the ideological stances regarding Macau’s gaming industry among three English-language newspapers published in the three Chinese territories mentioned above by comparing the patterns of co-selection of shared and unique words and phraseologies. The book’s findings confirm that the news media in these three territories differ in their ideological stances. Moreover, the book offers readers a fresh perspective on Macau by exploring how the region and its gaming industry are represented in three news article corpora. Thus, it provides unique insights into the similarities and differences among these three territories. Further, the research suggests that the methods adopted in this book can be replicated to examine and compare the news and political discourses in a variety of contexts. Accordingly, the book represents a valuable resource not only for students majoring in linguistics, media studies, communication, journalism, etc., but also for researchers in the fields of corpus linguistics, critical discourse analysis, etc.