This study draws on a synergy of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies to scrutinize the portrayal of hackers in China Daily and The New York Times in the 21st century (2001–2020), primarily revolving around the main social actors and targets in hacking. This study demonstrates that both media share a positive transformation of the image-building of hackers in the 21st century. Besides, countries are salient social actors in hacker media discourse and the two media differ in their ways of constructing them. The New York Times tends to have a negative other-representation and categorical otherness of specific countries through such discursive strategies as negative other-representation and group categorization, whereas China Daily is prone to insist on opposing the US hacking allegations in a defensive manner. Regarding major targets, China Daily highlights government websites whereas The New York Times emphasizes government websites, officials’ emails, large technology companies, and election infrastructure. The analysis shows that the two media’s different ways of framing hackers are underpinned by the ideologies behind them and the Chinese and US socio-political landscapes. This study can provide insights into how hacker discourse in media is represented in the 21st century and how national identities are constructed in the media representations of hackers.

A court judgment is a common legal discourse and the final carrier of court trial activities. From the perspective of socio-cognitive discourse analysis, this study aims to describe and explore the Chinese court judgments in a corpus-based method, concentrating on the interactions among discourse, cognitive, and social dimensions. We have three key findings through an empirical qualitative analysis of the court judgments in China. First, the discourse dimension of Chinese court judgments is both society-oriented and cognition-oriented. The discourse components could mark the cognition sources in court judgments. Second, the cognitive source of faith is a part of social cognition on law and regulation, and induction and paraphrase provide the personal cognition to testimony, documentary, or hearsay evidence. Besides, the cognitive source of inference could change personal cognition into a social consensus through a reasoning process. Third, the social function of court judgments corresponds to the cognitive source and builds the surface structure with various discourse components. Moreover, a probe into the multi-dimensional relationship in court judgments can offer practical insights into the interpretation of legal texts in Chinese judicial decision-making.