Transitivity And The Critical Study Of Political Discourse

Critical linguistics has been rapidly developed in recent decades, which provides a new approach to discourse analysis and promotes the establishment and development of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). Generally speaking, CDA is concerned about how to reveal the hidden ideology, imbalanced power relationship, inequality and injustice in discourse. It aims to investigate into the relationship between language, power and ideology as well.In the early period of CDA, scholars recognized that the transitivity system in Halliday’s systemic functional grammar is an effective and efficient analytical instrument for the investigation of ideology and power relations in discourse. But these studies was limited to study the headlines of news discourse or comparative study between Chinese and English news discourse likewise, there is still no systematic exploration of the way how transitivity can be used as an instrument for CDA to date. It is argued in this thesis that transitivity can not only be utilized to reveal the explicit or implicit ideology and power relation in news discourse, it also can be employed to disclose the ideology, control and power relation in political discourse including subcategories such as political speeches. political literature and political news. It is suggested that transitivity as an instrument for ideological analysis is applicable in recognizing and revealing the ideology, power and manipulation in political discourse.The data selected for the analysis includes three political speeches, three essays on the relation between language and politics by George Orwell, and political news on the death of Bin Laden from China Daily and New York Times. This study, analyzing these materials within the framework of systemic functional grammar, particularly with Transitivity as the point of theoretical departure, aims to illustrate and illuminate that Transitivity is an effective instrument to reveal ideology and power relation in political discourse. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis and the integration of three dimensional analysis proposed by Fairclough (1992), a tentative part of functional framework for CDA is formulated to illustrate the three steps for critical analysis of political discourse, i.e.(1) to describe the distribution of types of process in a discourse;(2) to interpret the experience being construed and the meaning; and (3) to explain why language is used as it is in that discourse. To some extent, hopefully it will contribute to paving the way for the establishment of political linguistics. Besides, this study is supposed to be of pedagogic significance as well in that it provides some implications on the cultivation of readers’critical language awareness.This thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter One gives a brief introduction of the study, including the rationale of the study, the significance of the study, methodology and data collection, and the organization of the thesis as well. Chapter Two concentrates on giving information of the previous studies, such as the definition, aim and the scope of CDA, definition and categories of political discourse, and the study of political discourse conducted abroad as well as at home. Chapter Three introduces the theoretical foundation of this thesis. A panoramic view of Transitivity, especially transitivity system proposed by Systemic Functional Grammar, studied by different approaches is presented, and a statement that transitivity is an instrument for ideological analysis is made. Chapter Four is the nucleus of this thesis. Different subtypes of political discourse, including political literature, political news, and political speeches, are to be analyzed to illustrate how ideologies and power relations are encoded, and how to recognize and reveal the hidden ideologies and power relations in political discourse. The procedure for critical study of discourse within the framework of Transitivity is expounded with a tentative model as well. Chapter Five is the conclusion which summarizes the major findings, the implications of the study as well as the prospects for future study.