A Critical Analysis Of English News Discourse In A Transitivity Perspective

Critical Linguistics, an instrumental linguistics based mainly on Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar, has developed since 1970s. It aims to unveil the hidden relationship between language, power and ideology, for ideology exists pervasively in any discourse, and it is located in both discourse structure and its content. As one of the analytical tools in critical linguistics, the transitivity approach to discourse analysis began when M.A.K. Halliday (1971) made a transitivity analysis of William Golding's novel The Inheritors. This thesis adopts it as its analyzing framework.With the development of the society, English news pervades every corner of people's life, exerting a strong influence on people's knowledge, belief, concept of value, social relationship, social identity, etc., which is, to a large extent, derived from the use of language. In addition, not all the press over the world share equal freedom and independence, for Western information and communication policies dominate the world. Thus critical reading is of significance. In conducting a transitivity analysis of English news discourse from China and the United Sates, the thesis here tends to investigate whether different ideologies hidden behind news discourse will show up when the news discourses are about the same news events and of the same genre and whether there is any difference in the choices of the transitivity processes in different genres.The news samples center on the three news events, namely Sino-US midair collision, Sept.ll terrorist attacks and the escalation of violence between Palestine and Israel in 2001. All the news samples are divided into three categories, inverted pyramid (hard news), commentary and feature (soft news).Through the critical analysis of English news discourse from a transitivity perspective, the main findings obtained are as follows:(1) News discourses are not so just or objective as they are proclaimed to be. News reports of same genre in different countries about the same news events usually reflect different ideologies, and the different ideologies can be revealed through a...