| Since the 1960s, M. A. K. Halliday has established Systemic Functional Grammar step by step. His Functional Grammar consists of three meta-functions: ideational function, interpersonal function, and textual function. Transitivity is one aspect of the ideational function.In 1971, Halliday had taken William Golding's The Inheritors as a sample to make a study by means of transitivity. This study is widely accepted as the earliest transitivity analysis applied to literary texts. According to the results of the analysis, he found that human beings are able to make use of ideational function to represent various types of experience. After this, other scholars have followed Halliday's step and the transitivity system has been taken as a tool to make research of the text analysis. However, those studies concentrate on literary productions, public speeches and news report, etc. Texts of TV documentaries are the blank filed, which has aroused little attention.Based on the above, with the transitivity system as a tool, this dissertation has made a contrastive analysis of Wild China and Forest China which are TV documentaries. This thesis seeks to find the answers for the following questions:1. What transitivity processes exist in Wild China and Forest China? And what is the distribution of each process appearing in Wild China and Forest China?2. What are the functions of transitivity processes in Wild China and Forest China respectively?3. In Wild China and Forest China, are there any shared features or distinct ones? If there are, what are they?4. What are those underlying factors influencing the distribution of the transitivity system in Wild China and Forest China?In order to address these questions, this paper has adopted a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to make research. The first step is to make transcriptions based on the Wild China and Forest China. The second step is to collect 10% of each transcribed text as research samples. The third step is to make an analysis of each clause and distinguish various processes within the transitivity system. The fourth step is to count the exact number of clauses belonging to each process, calculate the percentage of each process in all clauses and make different tables to show relevant data. The fifth step is to interpret and elaborate functions of each transitivity process through examples. The final step is to find out underlying factors that influence the distribution of the transitivity system in Wild China and Forest China. After the contrastive analysis, the thesis has obtained three major findings and relevant hidden factors. Firstly, all six types of transitivity processes exist in texts of Wild China and Forest China. Each type of processes has played its own function. This indicates that the transitivity system is applicable in texts of TV documentaries. Secondly, in both Wild China and Forest China, material, relational and mental processes are three main types. Behavioral, verbal and existential processes are three minor types. The stylistic features and themes of Wild China and Forest China account for the high ratio of material and relational processes. Thirdly, there are different features of transitivity distribution between Wild China and Forest China. In Forest China, the percentage of behavioral processes is over seven times as much as that in Wild China. In Wild China, the ratio of verbal processes is nearly two times as high as that in Forest China. In Wild China, the ratio of material and existential processes is slightly less than that in Forest China, whereas the ratio of relational and mental processes is a little more than that from Forest China. The producers'angles shed light on those differences. |
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