Transitivity Analysis Of Sports News In English Newspaper

In the early 1970s when M.A.K.Halliday made a transitivity analysis of William Golding's novel The Inheritor, transitivity approach to discourse analysis began. Then, transitivity analysis has got more and more attention for decades, especially on literary works. Most of the past research is on literary works. However, news text, as a type of public mass media discourse, has aroused more and more linguists'interest in recent years. This thesis will be on the transitivity analysis of sports news texts in English newspapers.In the past, transitivity analysis was usually used to compare the headlines or single clauses of two pieces of selected news. It seems that transitivity analysis, of these previous works, of news texts need to be further studied. This thesis tries to apply the quantitative study of transitivity to sports news texts in order to further analyze the characteristics of the sports news; on the other side, it also proves the practice and feasibility of the transitivity system.Throughout the quantitative transitivity analysis and discussion of 5 sports news texts which are selected from the China Daily and The New York Times. In the sports news texts there are mainly material processes and verbal processes regularly; except that, there are also certain percentage of verbal processes and mental processes; and some participants to each transitivity type in sports news occur regularly. And in the sports news texts, there are some quotation directly from protagonists and other people. Moreover the analysis of six processes will be shown along with the analysis.Material processes are usually applied to the sequences of actions; in the sports news, there are some reappearances of some scenes in the match. So the material processes are very important in the sports news texts, which shows the characteristics of information transferring. In sports news, the verbal processes have a distinguish feature: most of the verbs are'said'; no matter it is direct speech or indirect speech; in fact there are certain percentage of direct speech. The mainly function of news is to tell people what had happened and the real thing. And one of the best way is to quote people's original saying. In this way, news writer can tell people the real situation without his own opinion. Relational processes may evoke the readers'interest in the news story by offering the background information, the descriptions of the state in which the protagonists of the news are and some reaction and discussion of people to the news, which shows the characteristics of entertainment of sports news.It is a very important way to recognize transitivity patterns. Once they have been made visible, then texts become clearer in their ideological and other orientations and it will be easier to understand and analyze the sports news texts.It is hoped that after reading this thesis, English newspaper readers can understand sports news better and raise the cognitive ability of understanding at the same time.