A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Reports On The Beijing Winter Olympic Games In The New York Times From Transitivity Perspective

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games,which opened in Beijing,the capital of the People’s Republic of China,on February 4th and closed on February 20 th,is the 24 th Winter Olympic Games.The Beijing Winter Olympic Games is a global sports event.It not only provides an arena for sports athletes from all over the world to show themselves,but also builds a learning and exchange platform for promoting world peace,enhancing mutual understanding,realizing cultural integration,and transmitting civilized friendship.The Beijing Winter Olympic Games has received many attention and has been reported by various media.Several influential media and newspapers have set up special pages for tracking and reporting on the Beijing Winter Olympic Games,and The New York Times(NYT)is one of the most authoritative newspapers among them.The New York Times was established in 1851,covering editorial,business,economics,science,sports and other content.It has won a total of112 Pulitzer Prizes,which is the highest honor in the American press.In addition,data from the Federation International of the Periodical Press(FIPP)show that the subscriber data of NYT in the United States ranked first in the world in 2022.It can be seen that it has a great influence in the United States and internationally.Therefore,the relevant reports of the Beijing Winter Olympics in NYT have attracted much attention both domestically and internationally.Critical Discourse Analysis(CDA)is a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research field in discourse analysis(Wodak & Meyer,2009),which aims to reveal the ideology behind language by analyzing the characteristics and the sociocultural context of the language.The major task of Critical Discourse Analysis is to uncover the influence of ideology on discourse and the reaction of discourse on ideology through language form.In Critical Discourse Analysis,Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics is used as an analytical tool,and it deals with various types of discourse including media discourse of all types such as newspaper,social media,film,TV news broadcasts,etc.Quantitative and qualitative methods will be used in the study.A Critical Discourse Analysis will be conducted by using Halliday’s(1994)Transitivity system as an analytical tool,combined with Fairclough’s(1992)Three-dimensional Framework to analyze the Corpus of news reports on the Beijing Winter Olympic Games in NYT.And the following three questions will be answered:(1)What are the occurrences and distributions of process types in the reports on the Beijing Winter Olympic Games in NYT?(2)How is each process in Transitivity system realized in the reports on the Beijing Winter Olympic Games in NYT?(3)What are the ideologies hidden behind the reports on the Beijing Winter Olympic Games in NYT?This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter One is the Introduction.The background,aim and significance of the research as well as the organization of this thesis will be introduced in this chapter.Chapter Two is Literature Review.The previous studies on CDA and Transitivity system,which consist of studies abroad and at home will be presented.Chapter Three is Research Design.The research questions,the way of data collection about reports on the Beijing Winter Olympic Games in NYT,the research methodology including the UAM Corpus Tool and Fairclough’s Three-dimensional Framework and the research procedures of this thesis will be introduced respectively.Chapter Four is The Critical Discourse Analysis of the News.The general occurrences and distributions of Transitivity,the analysis of each process and the hidden ideologies in the news reports will be explored in this chapter.Chapter Five is Conclusion.In this chapter,major findings of the study,the limitations in the research and some suggestions for a future study will be mentioned.In this study,the conclusions are summarized as follows: material process accounts for the highest percentage,followed by relational process,verbal process,mental process and existential process;the processes of Transitivity system are realized by verbal groups,which have different characteristics in each process type;through the analysis such ideologies in NYT as rumoring human rights issues,discrediting and interfering in politics,slandering China’s restrictions on freedom of speech,defaming Chinese athletes and sports systems,belittling the Beijing Winter Olympics and criticizing the pandemic prevention policy have been revealed.