Transitivity Analysis Of News Reports About Chinese Economy

In order to arouse readers’interest and curiosity, news reports present facts in a particular way. In a sense, news is not the real event itself, but rather the product of a series of selection and conversion of reality. As a science, linguistics has developed a system of research methods and theories to investigate the relationship between language and society. Since the 1970s, transitivity as an important concept in systemic functional grammar has become an important method in discourse analysis to reveal how speakers encode in language their mental picture of reality and how they account for their experience of the world around them.Based on the transitivity system model in the Systemic Functional Grammar proposed by Simpson (1993), this dissertation aims to explore the features of the transitivity employed in the economic news reports. Texts of three pieces of news about Chinese economy are chosen from the British magazine The Economist as materials for analysis. By analyzing the four types of processes of the transitivity in the new report about Chinese economy, the present study conducts a close investigation into the relationship between news texts and the forces hidden behind them. The study finds that economic news texts have featured a great employment of material and relational processes. Mental and verbal processes are other two relatively less dominant transitivity types. The four main process types occur almost regularly in certain parts of the news texts, and the participants of each transitivity type are usually predictable. The economic news reports, though in some cases appear a little emotional, are on the whole objective and neutral.Finally, it is hoped that the current study exploring the features of news reports from the perspective of transitivity system could deepen the audience’s understanding of news reports as a social and ideological phenomenon.