Ideational Meta-function In English & Chinese Healthy Diet Reports: A Comparative Study With Transitivity

This research is designed to explore ideational meta-function in English & Chinese Healthy Diet Reports (HDRs) through the analysis of the transitivity system in them. The originality lies in a functional comparison and contrast of a kind of newly touched media discourse—HDR in English and Chinese. At the same time, it is another attempt on the application of Systemic Functional Grammar into Chinese discourse analysis developed by M. A. K. Halliday in the early 1960s to prove its practicality and usefulness.The author intends to find answers to these questions: 1. What types of processes exist in English & Chinese HDRs? What are the ratios of those different process types appeared in this kind of text in two different languages? 2. In English & Chinese HDRs, are there any shared common features or any differences? If any, what are they? 3. How does the transitivity system in English & Chinese HDRs realize ideational meta-function? 4. What are those underlying factors influencing the distribution of the transitivity system in English & Chinese HDRs?Through the transitivity analysis and statistical calculation of the percentage of different processes in English and Chinese samples, this study finds that, as the same genre of media discourse, English & Chinese HDRs show more similarities than differentials. Four types of transitivity processes make up the majority: relational, material, mental and verbal processes, among which relational process occupies the most prominent position. All of the processes appeared in English & Chinese HDRs fully realize ideational meta-function. At the same time, the distribution gets influenced by the genre and the theme of English & Chinese HDRs. English & Chinese HDR is a composite genre of description and exposition and its theme is to tell readers the new dietary concepts and to convince people what it advocates. Other underlying factors, which help to affect the distribution of the transitivity system in English & Chinese HDRs, are different cultures and ideology.