| Transitivity is a very important linguistic concept that is proposed by the renowned British linguist Halliday in his theory of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). It is a system including six types of process:material processes, mental processes, relational processes, behavioral processes, verbal processes and the existential processes. The transitivity system, which is a major tool for discourse analysis, has been applied to analyze a variety of discourses especially literary works for decades.Due to the different social ideologies, the views of different people on the same event may be different, and the expressions of their views are also different. The choice is meaning. People try to express different points of view by choosing different language forms. News media, which are social existences, would be inevitably influenced by the society and also influence the society at the same time. The media report news according to the social ideologies, meanwhile affect the readers’ideologies through the news reports. Therefore, there are differences in news reports and all news reports are not absolutely objective in fact. News discourse, has always been an important object of transitivity analysis. Researchers at home and abroad have already made transitivity analysis of news discourse to a certain extent, however, these researches are usually limited to the analysis of the news headlines and the analysis of the characteristics of transitivity system in a specific type of news discourse. The transitivity analysis of news discourse requires a further development.This thesis selects the news reports of the event that American soldiers killed16Afghan civilians from American and Chinese news media (CNN and China Daily) which were published on March12,2012as the samples of the analysis, and chooses transitivity in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar as the research instrument, and analyzes and discusses the processes, participants in the two news reports in detail.Through the analysis of the two news reports on the same event, we can found that there are five process types in both the two news reports:material process, verbal process, relational process, mental process and existential process. And material process, verbal process, relational process are the three main process types in the news discourses. However, there are differences in each type of process. In the application of material processes, the news reports of CNN and China Daily apply different structures to describe the event, they use the sequence of material processes to describe the different actions of American Army and soldiers, CNN emphasizes the soldier is acting alone but China Daily dose not; in the application of verbal processes. CNN and China Daily pay more attention to the verbal processes with different "Sayers"; in the application of relational processes, CNN and China Daily put emphasis on different relationships concerning the event; in the application of mental processes, CNN has more mental processes; in the application of existential processes, China Daily is more objective to mention the existence of conflicting reports about the number of the American soldiers involved in the event.It is found that the news report which was published by the American news media CNN on the killing spree of Afghan civilians by American soldiers focuses on reducing the responsibility of the U.S. military, stressing that the event is just the result of personal behaviors. But the news report published by the Chinese news media China Daily objectively expresses the doubt about the number of American soldiers involved in the shootings and shows the sympathy for the victims.The research proves that transitivity or transitivity system is a tool that is powerful in revealing the relationship between language and ideology. It is expected that the thesis would help the readers of English news reports to improve their cognitive ability of language and raise their awareness of perceiving unconscious views in news discourse so as to have a more profound understanding of news discourse. |
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