A Study Of The Self-Construction Of China’s National Image In News Reports Of China Daily On 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics From The Perspective Of Transitivity System

National image,an important part of a country’s"soft power",has been the focus of many scholars since it was put forward.Early studies on the construction of national image were carried out in the fields of communication,international relations and cross-culture,and subsequently attracted wide attention from the linguistics community.With the improvement of China’s international status,how to reposition China’s national image has become a new survey for domestic scholars.Linguists often study the construction of China’s national image in political discourse,news discourse or speech discourse from the perspectives of critical discourse analysis,corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics.Although the researches on China’s national image construction have achieved relatively fruitful results,most of them focus on the distorted construction of China’s image by foreign media,or the comparative study on the different images of China created by Chinese and foreign media,and less put an eye on how domestic media realize the"self-construction"of China’s image.The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics took place in the complex background of COVID-19 pandemic and impeded globalization.As one of the most heated mega events in the world,the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics has become a significant channel to highlight China’s image to the world.However,up to now,there are few researches on the news reports about the Beijing Winter Olympic Games and national image construction,and most of them are found in the realms of sports or mass media.Therefore,from the perspective of transitivity,this study intends to explore the national image of China constructed in China Daily’s reports on the Beijing Winter Olympics,and explores the"self-construction"path of China’s national image from the perspective of linguistics.In this study,58 news reports about the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games published on the official English website of China Daily from 3^rd,Feb,2022 to 23^rd,Feb,2022 are selected as the research corpus.Based on the Transitivity System of Systemic-Functional Grammar,with the assistance of UAM Corpus Tool 3.3v,a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis was adopted to examine the distribution of transitive process and participant,to extract their realization forms in the corpus,and to analyze them with specific instances,aiming at answering the following research questions:（1）What’s the distribution of transitivity processes and participants in the news reports of China Daily on Beijing Winter Olympics?（2）How are the transitivity processes and participants realized in the news reports of China Daily on Beijing Winter Olympics?（3）What images of China are self-constructed by transitivity processes and participants in the news reports of China Daily on Beijing Winter Olympics?Research findings are as follows:（1）In the corpus,material processes are the most common;actor and goal are the most prominent.The descending order of proportion is:material process and material participants,relational process and relational participants,verbal process and verbal participants,mental process and mental participants,behavioral process and behavioral participants,existential process and existential participants.The high-frequency material process emphasizes China’s specific practice,while the large number of actor and goal define the subject and receiver of the practice,enhancing the authenticity and concreteness of the China’s image constructed by the discourse.The fact that the proportion of verbal process and its participants is higher than that of mental process and its participants is a significant feature of the selected data,which confirms the objectivity of the news discourse and avoids subjectivity as much as possible.The realizations of transitivity process and participant set the tone and reveal the theme of the discourse respectively.For one thing,transitivity process in the corpus is realized by verbs or phrasal verbs with neutral or positive connotations,which set the positive tone of the discourse.For the other,participants are realized by a large number of nouns,noun phrases and sentences representing China,Beijing Winter Olympics,world peace and unity,technology,winter sports,and environment,highlighting the four main themes of the discourse,i.e.,peace and unity,technology,winter sports,and green ecology.In the aspect of China’s image construction,process path is the core,which represents the realistic influence and social significance brought by the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics,and creates an objective and authentic China’s image;while the participant path is an important embodiment of the transitive semantic system.It realizes the thematic semantics of China’images by the hierarchical selection of the micro language system such as participant types and lexical semantic collocations.Through different transitivity process and participant,the selected news reports construct China as the contributor to world peace and unity,the leader of advanced technology,the promoter of winter sports and the advocate of green ecology.This study clarifies the language strategies and their realizations in news reports,which is helpful for readers to have an all-round and in-depth interpretation to grasp the underlying implications of news reports.In addition,this study demonstrates the mode of national image construction in news reports,which helps news media to take the initiative to independently construct China’s national image and provides enlightenment for the improvement of the"self-construction"ability of China’s image.