A Corpus-based Study On Discursive Representations Of Covid-19 In British,American And Australian Mainstream News Media: A Transitivity Perspective

The Covid-19 pandemic that gripped the world since early 2020 has spurred a burst of production in the discourse of mass media,newspapers in particular.With the global pandemic,local or national newspapers have issued amounts of reports on its impacts on daily practices,and national and international policies.These reports could influence people’s perception of the virus and also crucial for preventing and controlling the pandemic.Such news discourses are therefore important to the investigation of national attitudes toward the pandemic,yet the literature review suggests that the representation of Covid-19 and the ideological differences behind language use therein are largely under-investigated.This paper presents a corpus-based critical discourse analysis（CDA）of the discursive representation of Covid-19 in news discourses,employing the TRANSITIVITY system in systemic functional linguistics（SFL）to interpret the reports from the mainstream media in England,the U.S.A.,and Australia.The study aims to explore how Covid-19 is constructed in the news media and what differences in the discursive construction of Covid-19 suggest about the ideological differences.Hence,the present study compiled three sub-corpora of news reports（with Covid-19/COVID-19 in news headlines）from the Daily Telegraph,the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald published between January 1^st 2020 and May31^st 2021.Sketch Engine is used for further data processing.The study shows that there are both qualitative similarities and quantitative differences in the ways Covid-19 was discursively represented,which points to discrepancies in reporting,preventing,and controlling Covid-19 in the three countries.Based on a transitivity analysis of the data,the study identified five different process types across the corpora,namely material,relational,mental,verbal and existential processes.The study further shows that material and relational processes are dominantly employed to represent Covid-19 in newspapers.A close look at material process suggests that frequency of Covid-19 functioning as a Goal is much higher than as an Actor in the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald.The phenomenon that Covid-19 frequently serves as the Goal shows that these two newspapers highlight the urgent measures and the role of people in the anti-pandemic work;whereas the Daily Telegraph is apt to construct Covid-19 as the Actor,reporting the damage and the social changes caused by the health crisis.In the analysis of relational clauses,the study shows that the newspapers are more likely to employ attributive relational clauses in the construction of Covid-19,describing and illustrating the attributes that Covid-19 has and the latest updates on the outbreak.Furthermore,it is found that these linguistically representational strategies of Covid-19 are also reinforced with six discourse strategies,which have been identified as 1)identification and specification of the social actors and actions,2)management of the voices of social actors,3)illustration of the factors and symptoms of Covid-19,4)numbers of the victims,5)comparing Covid-19 with other diseases,and 6)deployment of metaphors.Overall,the study is of significance on the grounds that it has synergised corpus linguistics and systemic functional linguistics to the exploration of discursive representations of Covid-19 in news reports,which contributes to the exploration of the association between languages use and social reality.A review of related literature suggests that traditional critical discourse studies tend to focus on the lexical-grammatical aspects of,instead of the semantic roles of the target social event.The kind of methodological synergy adopted in the current study would thus have theoretically compensated for the shortcomings and contributes to critical discourse studies.