A Study Of English News Reports Of African Countries On “Belt And Road Initiative” From The Perspective Of Transitivity System

With the deepening of international cooperation at home and abroad,the influence of the “Belt and Road Initiative” in international communication is increasing.News reports,as an important means of communication,report and disseminate events and information to the public.At the same time,news reports reflect the cultural background and ideology of the reporter to varying degrees.At present,the academic circles have made an extensive study of the news reports related to the “Belt and Road Initiative” in western countries.However,the research on the English news reports in African countries on the “Belt and Road Initiative” is rarely addressed.And insufficient researches are analyzed from the perspective of transitivity system.Transitivity system,as one of the most important semantic systems,classifies the human being’s experience into different transitivity processes.With the transitivity system under Halliday’s Systematic Gunctional Grammar as the theoretical framework,this study mainly addresses the following research questions:(1)What are the distribution patterns of participants,processes and circumstances of the transitivity system in the collected reports?(2)How are the transitivity components realized in the collected reports?(3)What attitudes of African countries are revealed towards China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” based on transitivity analysis? This study combines descriptive and qualitative analysis of 30 news reports about China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” in African news reports,such as Today’s Daily,Cape Times and National Daily.The study shows that five of the six processes of transitivity system processes were adopted in the news reports.Among them,the material process accounts for the highest proportion,followed by the relational process,the verbal process,the mental process,and the existential process,but there is no behavioral process.In these transitivity processes,by giving “China”,“African countries”,“Western countries” and their related parties the role of process participants,we can find that African countries actively respond to the initiative and participate in it in order to seek their own development in spite of some doubts.The results of the study suggest that we should also further strengthen the publicity of the “Belt and Road Initiative” so as to promote a profound understanding of the initiaive by African countries.This thesis makes a discourse analysis of the news reports of the “Belt and Road Initiative” of African countries based on the transitivity system,revealing the attitudes hidden behind the news reports of African countries,which will help to inspire readers to understand the implicit meaning of the attitudes behind the news reports.