Agency Suppressing In English Political Discourse

Generally speaking,there is usually an external cause which leads to the happening of a process in the real world. This cause is called AGENCY in linguistics (Halliday,1985;1994),and it is often expressed explicitly in people's description of the process so as to let the hearer/reader know the truth as quickly as possible.However,in daily life we have ever witnessed many linguistic descriptions in which the agency is not expressed clearly but suppressed by various linguistic devices. This phenomenon has attracted some linguists' attention. Halliday,Kennedy,Burton,and Kies have discussed the agency construction of particular literary texts,and their insightful researches suggest that the characteristics of agency construction of a literary text always betray the author's intention and the theme of the text.As we know,one of the trends in the present linguistic circle is a return to real life data (Granger,1983:39). As to the study of agency construction,a few researchers,like Galasinski and Marley (1998),have turned to the linguistic materials used in people's daily life. However,the discussions on the agency construction of real life data are still too limited,far from enough. Therefore,with the insight of the former researches,and from a new perspective,this dissertation conducts a case study on the characteristics of agency construction of a particular kind of real life data-English political discourse,attempting to prove that agency suppressing is a stylistic feature of this kind of discourse.The object of the case study is the news reports and comments on the mid-air collision between a US plane and a Chinese plane on April 1st,2001. Twenty-four texts are selected by stratified sampling from the Internet. In light of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar,thirteen linguistic devices of suppressing agency are figured out from the sample texts. And the analysis on the agency construction of the descriptions on four details illustrates the speaker/writer of the political discourse's strong consciousness to agency suppressing and well readiness to employ agency suppressing devices. What's more,the analysis on the agencyconstruction of a whole sample text further proves that agency suppressing is a stylistic feature of English political discourse.The study of this dissertation illustrates from one perspective the subtleties of language use in English political discourse,making some pedagogical contributions to the English study and teaching,especially to the training of translators,interpreters,and diplomatic agents' political sensitivity.