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.