A Contrastive Analysis Of Transitivity In Chinese And American President’s New Year Blessings

Language has the function that makes human beings able to build a mental picture ofreality, and to make them understand what goes on around them and inside them. Accordingto Halliday, the discourse is not only a process of communication, but also a product ofcommunication. Discourse analysis of transitivity began in early1970s. And then, in decades,people have used transitivity analysis to analyze various types of discourse. In recent years,people have explored Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and have applied it to all kindsof fields. There are many people tend to focus on transitivity analysis of American Presidents’Inaugural Address, but few people focus on the transitivity analysis of Presidents’ New YearBlessings.Based on the transitivity theory, this paper tries to analyze the New Year Blessings fromthe choice of the process types and the transitivity of the clauses, and the purpose is todiscover the distribution of the process types in these New Year Blessings. In the address onlyfive process types were found. The material process is the most frequently used process, andthen existential process and relational process come next, mental process and verbal process.Behavior process never appears. Throug study, the paper has made the major findings：1) In the address only five process types were found. The material process is the mostfrequently used process both in Chinese and American President’s New Year Blessings. Somaterial process takes up a large proportion both in Chinese texts and American text,especially in Chinese texts, it’s72%. President’s New Year Blessing is one of typical festivalspeeches with specific aims. Generally, the president chooses more objective and morepersuasive processes to reach their goals. The best options for their aims are materialprocesses and relational processes.2) In Chinese president’s New Year Blessings, the proportion of relational process ismuch less than what is in American president’s New Year Blessings. Relational process is akind of method with objective evaluation and judgment, so it will be easy for the audience toreceive the idea conveyed from the speaker.3) The proportion of mental process in Chinese president’s New Year Blessings is justhalf of that in American president’s New Year Blessings. Both of the presidents applieddifferent mental process verbs to sensors to show their different attitudes and subjectiveemotions. Verbal process never appears in these texts. This phenomenon is accord with thefact that context restrains the use of language.To analyze the New Year Blessing with transitivity, the author uses the qualitative studyto achieve the purpose to make the analysis of the transitivity features of them more objectiveand to show the discourse functions of each transitivity type.8pieces of New Year Blessingtexts have been collected from the websites, and the author displays these results of research by many tables, to make it easy to show its transitivity features more clearly. We can take thisthesis as an example on the applications of transitivity analysis. Through examining mainprocesses of a text, a learner can understand the ideational function of the text and choices ofwords better. At the same time, it can also enhance learners’ functional awareness andappreciative ability.