| Discourse analysis has been applied to various types of discourses for decades. Most of such studies have been conducted with the mainstream of discourse analysis (DA) ---non-critical approaches. However, in the past twenty to thirty years, a new approach known as critical discourse analysis (CDA) came into being. CDA, usually approached from the angles of linguistics, sociology, and psychology, aims to uncover the relations between language, power and ideology through analysis of linguistic forms. Presently, this form of analysis itself is continuing to evolve and improve.Mass media is an indispensable part of modern society and is understood as a significant force to participate in the socializing process. Since news report, as a type of public mass media discourse, is of interest to critical discourse analysis, it is chosen as the analyzing data in this thesis by adopting a critical approach to discourse analysis. In this thesis, following the principle of critical discourse analysis and the classification of types of news in regards of fields, five types of English news samples have been selected from different news media.In earlier CDA works, the transitivity system in Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) was believed to be an efficient instrument for investigating ideologies hidden in news reporting. But the transitivity analyses of those works were confined to the comparison between the headlines and isolated clauses of two pieces of selected news. The transitivity analysis, of previous works of news texts, seems to be not fleshed out, therefore needing to be expanded upon. Intending to further explore the transitivity analysis in news texts, this thesis tries to prove that the qualitative and quantitative study of transitivity can be applied to the selected news samples in order to fulfill CDA's objective. In a word, the aim of this thesis is to utilize the qualitative and quantitative transitivity analysis of news to dig out the oblique ideology concealed in news texts.The theoretical framework of the analysis of this thesis is a combination of transitivity system from the systemic functional grammar and critical discourse analysis. The theories of functional discourse analysis and critical analysis are combined as the theoretical framework because the two theories have similarities in their goals and they are complementary to each other in providing analytical tools for the analysis. This thesis is a transitivity analysis of the practical English news reports from the perspective of CDA. Five different types of English news reports during year 2000-2006 have been selected from different news media as the authentic materials for the study. The five samples belong to five hot fields, i.e. politics, trade, society, economy, sports. The critical analysis of the five samples reveals that dominant ideology does embed in different news reports, it directly or indirectly affects and controls the perception of the public and has important functions in shaping the attitudes and ideologies of the public. Research methods like qualitative exploration and quantitative statistics are adopted to guarantee the validity of the results of the analysis.In all, the analysis and discussion of the thesis tentatively verifies the assumption that transitivity can be a workable analytical tool of CDA in news. By means of transitivity analysis we can raise the awareness of perceiving unconscious ideologies in news and be guided to have a deeper understanding of news and the language in news. |
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