A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Chinese And Western News Reports On Sex Education In China From The Perspective Of Transitivity

Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA)takes Halliday's Systematic Functional Grammar(SFG)as the main theoretical basis to reveal the underlying ideology behind the language.News report inevitably brings about specific ideologies and tendencies,has always been the research interest of scholars who study the CDA.This research focuses on the reports of sex education in China to make a critical discourse analysis from the perspective of transitivity system,mainly coping with three research questions: 1.What are the distributions of process types in the selected news reports about sex education from CHINA DAILY and western newspapers and what are their differences in the choice of process in the news? 2.How to make the semantic classification of verbs in the actional processes and what are the features of verbs from two sources of news reports? 3.Seen from the verbs in clauses,what hidden ideologies can be revealed respectively in the news reports?To answer these three research questions,from the perspective of Fairlough's three-dimensional framework and Halliday's transitivity analysis,the author makes a critical discourse analysis of the news reports of sex education in China from CHINA DAILY and western newspapers.By studying the distributions of transitivity processes and verbs in the actional process,the author attempts to reveal the different ideologies hidden in two sources of newspapers.The research has drawn three research findings: 1.Western media and CHINA DAILY have the highest frequency of use of material processes and relational process.Then,through the verbal and mental process,the reporter could enhance the authenticity of news reports.Notwithstanding,there are still subtle differences between the overall trend of process selection from two types of news discourse.For example,the mainstream western media prefer to use the verbal process to describe the speech content of news people,making the report more convincing;while CHINA DAILY is more inclined to use the mental process in that the vivid mental activities of people could shorten the distance between readers and journalists.2.Verbs in material process can be divided into three categories: INTERACTION,DESCRIPTION and PERFORMANCE;verbs in verbal process belong to two groups: MESSAGE-TRANFERRING and MANNER OF SPEECH;verbs in mental process is represented by COGNITION and WISH.In a word,there exist some obvious differences in the use of verbs in reports.CHINA DAILY have expressed both positive and negative attitudes,and western newspapers are totally negative.3.Through the classification of transitivity verbs and the comparative analysis of the contextual meaning embodied in the process,it can be noted that in all,the differences in ideologies are existing in four aspects,including the focus,attitudes,perceptions of participants and social values of CHINA DAILY and western newspapers.Generally speaking,the Chinese media admits the problem of lacking sex education in China.Nevertheless,their main purpose is to formulate plans for the future as well as the responsibilities that government agencies should have,and at the same time,to strengthen the enthusiasm of young people to learn the sex knowledge by themselves.On the whole,CHINA DAILY still holds a positive attitude to the issue.Whereas,western media tends to discuss the serious consequences for the absence of sex education in China and criticizes the government's omission on livelihood issues of citizens.Furthermore,they are talking too much about the suffering and pain of young people.Hence,they mainly emphasize the negligence of the government and institutions and generally hold a negative attitude to the issue.Practically,news discourse serves the power relations and ideology and affects people's value tendency.This study provides a new cognitive method for the public to read news media reports and enhances the public's awareness of language criticism.In theory,this study tries to combine the theory of CDA,transitivity analysis and verb classification together.By analyzing the contextual meaning of the process from the semantic meaning of the verb,the scope of the linguistic study is expanded.