Discoursive Construction Of The National Image Of China

Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Linguistics is an effective theoretical foundation of discourse analysis.He believes that language has three major metafunctions: the ideational function, the interpersonal functionand the textual function. The three metafunctions are represented in the context of every discourse. Theideational function consists of transitivity system and voice system. From the perspective of transitivity,this thesis takes a qualitative and quantitative analysis on the related news reports from The New YorkTimes about the15th,16th,17th,18thNational People’s Congress of the Communist Party of China andinvestigates the realization of the ideational function in these news discourses.This thesis introduces three research questions:1. How does The New York Times construct thenational image of China in its reports on China’s political events from the perspective of transitivity?2.What are the common traits that shared by The New York Times’ reports on China’s political event duringthe past fifteen years from the perspective of transitivity?3. Are there any diachronic changes of China’simage in The New York Times’reports on China’s political events during the past fifteen years? If any, whatare they?The news material of the thesis is from the archives of the official website of The New York Times. Thenews reports are searched according to the key word “China” with the specific time of the meeting session.Through manual selection, the author picks out the reports on each congress. The words number of newsdiscourse of each congress is limited between3000and3500. And four discourse databases are establishedcorresponding to the four congresses. The transitivity research about the news discourse is conducted fromboth macroscopic and microcosmic aspects. From the macroscopic point, the focus is on the distribution,proportion, diachronic changes of transitivity processes of the selected news. From the microcosmic point,the focus is on the features and organization of participants, circumstantial elements of different progresses.In this study, UAM Copus Tool is used to conduct the annotation and the statistic of the selected newsdiscourse to obtain the transitivity features, and then SPSS is used to analyze the obtained data of thetransitivity features.Through the statistics and analysis of the transitivity features of the selected news discourse, this studydraws the following conclusions: there are some common features shared by the four databases in terms oftransitivity, meanwhile some diachronic changes of transitivity features can be observed. Five processesappear in the four databases, which including material, verbal, mental, relational, and existential process;among them material process occupies the most prominent position; the percentage of material processes goes higher each time from the15thNPC to the18thNPC, which reflects that the reports become moreauthentic. But until the18thNPC, the proportion of material process is only60.15%, which is still a lowproportion for news discourse whose tenet is to present the actual facts of news events. Therefore, TheNew York Times does not make quite authentic reports on China. Verbal process also accounts for a largeproportion in the news reports of each congress, which indicates that the selected news reports make aconsiderable proportion of comments on the news events. Relational process has a diachronic descendingproportion in the four databases and it is the only transitive process that has the diachronic significantdifference from the15thNPC to the18thNPC. In addition, through the analysis of the participants and thecircumstantial elements in all the processes, this study finds that when The New York Times reportspolitical events of China, it does not strictly follow the objective principle, but intends to bend the imageof government and leaders of China.In summary, the research reveals the ideology hidden behind the news report, and enriches theresearch fields of transitivity system in SFL. The conclusion of this study is supposed to help news readersto improve their political sensitivity so as to avoid the manipulation of news discourses, meanwhile it canbe served as reference to know China’s image in west media.