Critical Discourse Analysis: Phuong Thao's 'Heartlessness'

The written text
The written text is an online news article titled “Heartlessness”, which was written by Phuong Thao and published in The Saigon Times online newspaper (http://english.thesaigontimes.vn/39615/Heartlessness.html) on February 27, 2015. The published copy of “Heartlessness” is provided in Appendix C. In “Heartlessness”, Thao (2015) objectively presents different reactions of the local residents, authorities and culture researchers to a traditional spring festival in Bac Ninh Province. In the controversy in which domestic as well as foreign individuals and organizations are interested, the author is apparently against the continuity of the festival by quoting authorities’ defences.

Analysis
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) examines a talk or a text to find out underlying meaning related to socio-cultural aspects (Van Dijk, 2003; Hyland, 2005). By analysing genre, cohesive and referential features of the text as well as
Hyponymy of “pig” and “animals” found in line 50 also helps indicate that criticism of bad treatment of animals in Vietnam goes beyond Nem Thuong village to nationwide. In the second paragraph, the author describes the origin of Nem Thuong’s slaughter festival which is considered as an unbreakable reason for the locals’ refusal of changing the slaughter ritual and the festival’s name in paragraph 4, 5 and 6. In the last paragraph, cultural professors and researchers also lean on history to say that authorities will not easily remove “cultural, religious, and spiritual” practices, even the violent or bloody ones from folk rites. Paragraphs 7, 8, 9 and 10 with repeated similar vocabularies such as “concern” (line 45) or “warnings” (line 61), “cruel”/ “brutal”/ “bacbaric” (line 50, 51 and 54) demonstrate animal rights advocates’ attitudes towards the festival in Nem