Research Design

Part II provides the empirical study, including chapters on the methodology of pragmatic text analysis, the main findings, and a new theoretical framework to analyse Chinese official discourse on sovereignty matters. Chapter 6 “Research Design” presents the concrete steps taken during the analysis. It details the methodological guidelines, as found in the literature on Linguistic Pragmatics, and lists the research questions, relating to thematic hierarchies, ideological meaning generation on the macro and micro textual levels, and news domestication or audience design. The reader is offered a comprehensive picture of possible linguistic strategies and ideological undercurrents of a text. As the first chapter of this volume's second part, covering the empirical analysis, Chapter 6 outlines the multi-method approach adopted for the study and its research questions. It presents the research procedure for a language-pragmatic analysis of ideology in media texts. Different from the discussion in Chapter 1 of theoretical notions, such as indeterminacy of meaning and negotiability or variability as key properties of language use, this chapter focuses on the concrete steps taken in the analytical process.