Corpus-based Transitivity Analysis Of English Media News

With Halliday's functional grammar further explored and applied to a variety of fields of social science nowadays , the goal of discourse analysis is directed more concentrating to intervention and contribution rather than description and deconstruction and the social impacts through analyzing language are particularly emphasized. The approach of transitivity analysis, as one major tool of discourse analysis from experiential function's view, then, has been applied to a variety of discourses for decades. Even though some language researchers have put an actual practice to transitivity analysis on a certain degree, it seems that transitivity analysis , of these previous work , of news text need to be intensified and narrowed down to a centralized. Thus the thesis will be on the transitivity analysis of English media news on the internet.The thesis attempts to prove that the corpus-based quantitative study can be applied to analyzing news texts in order to fulfill the objectivity of working out the transitivity features of news on the internet and thus revealing the pragmatic functions of transitivity types in media news.Through the the quatntitative analysis and discussion of 10 sample news texts selected from some elite American and British newspaper online,and SPSS processing of the data ,the aim of the thesis has been achieved: The four main processes types occur nearly regularly in certain parts of the news which is displayed in SPSS graphs. And participants involved usually are predictable. Furthmore, the pragmatic functions are revealed along the analysis of each tansitivity type.Identifying the transitivity types in news texts is the first step to decode the hidden meanings that the news writers intend to convey. Once they have been made clear, the texts may start becoming easily comprehensable and it is easier to explainwhy some choices of verbs are tetter or worse than otters.It is expected that the thesis can raise the readers' awareness of perceiving unconscious viewpoints in the news texts so that they can be guided to have deeper cognition of news and penetrate the language itself so as to improve the reading comprehension of English news.