| Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was developed by Roger Fowler, Gunther Kress and so on, in the late 1970s. It attempts to unveil the hidden ideologies behind language, by combining linguistic analysis with the relevant social and historical background. The mass media discourses especially newspapers, have been its particular interests, Till now, there has been a lot of research into reports on current issues and the featured stories, yet much less as regard to editorials. Editorials are designed to state the opinions of the newspaper itself, whose topics range from politics, economy to military affairs. An editorial is usually released by the authorities of news agencies, and it is, by no means, exempt from the official ideological manipulation. This thesis intends to critically analyze 30 English editorials on political issues, which are released by influential American newspapers. This study of the relationship between language and ideology follows the CDA mode proposed by Fowler (1986) and adopts the transitivity in Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG) as the perspective.Fowler (1979a, 1986) believes that people from different social strata tend to use different linguistic expressions in the same social context. The particular set of linguistic features, on one hand, reflects the language user's distinctive ideology, and on the other hand works as the instrument to manifest and advocate the ideology. The ideology is usually manifested in power relationship and group interests. Fowler proposed a CDA mode to illustrate such relationship between language and ideology. He emphasized that the study of social and historical background would help explain the noticeable linguistic features in the discourse, and as a result reveal the hidden ideology.Critical linguists (Fowler et al, 1979b; Tompson,1995; Fairclough, 1993; Chen, 1995) usually employ Halliday's transitivity system, modality and transformation as the general linguistic analytic tools in CDA. However, multiple perspectives often affect the depth of study. Therefore, the single perspective of transitivity is adopted in this study. Halliday's SFG has a close relationship with CDA, because they share the same linguistic concept, regarding language as social practice and social intervening force. Furthermore, the transitivity system has been proved illuminating in CDA.This paper attempts to first sort out the distribution of processes in English editorials on political issues. Then, it reveals the ideological functions of the process types that occur most frequently in the discourse. It is discovered that the language in editorials on political issues carries the ideology of controlling group and represents its interests. This is achieved by transforming the official ideology into the common sense. It is best reflected by the three major process types of transitivity. Relational processes distinguish and evaluate the people concerned, classifying them into two opposite groups: 'Us' or 'Self and 'Them' or 'Others'. Besides, 'We' are always superior to 'Them'. Material and mental processes describe the two opposite worlds respectively, focusing on the consensus within 'Us' and the conflicts within 'Them'. The purpose is to impose the intended consensus on the readership. As a result, the official stance hidden in 'Us' is advocated.
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