Analysis Of Transitivity In News Texts In Perspective Of Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) or Critical Linguistics (CL), as a branch ofdiscourse analysis, was established and developed by the western linguists, to just name afew, Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress, during the period from the late1970s through tothe early1980s. CDA lays stress on the relationship between language and society. Theyargue that language, especially language use, has become a social practice. Thus, there is aclose relation between language and society, since language reflects not only the objectivesocial reality, but also the power and ideology hidden behind the reality.CDA attaches importance on critical analysis of all non-literary texts. Nevertheless,up to now, news text is still the main study field in CDA research. Like any other texts,news writing also uses language to express and elaborate the real world. That is to say,news reportage is a social practice, and news text is the very production of this practice. Itembodies and reflects the stances and views of the producer. Thus, it is not an actual factwithout any bias and prejudice but is engaged in the social construction of reality. Hence,CDA aims at examining ideology hidden behind the linguistic structures through analysisof language features and socio-historical background in which the text occurs, and furtherrevealing the relations among language, power and ideology.M.A.K.Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar is regarded as the main andimportant theoretical and methodical sources in the CDA tradition. Halliday holds thatlanguage fulfills three metafunctions: the ideational function, the interpersonal functionand the textual function. And the ideational function, usually realized by transitivitysystem, is one of main analytical aspects for CDA research. Thus, the thesis will employtransitivity system to make a critical analysis of news texts. Transitivity system has a rolein dividing the experience world into a set of manageable processes. The manageableprocesses are of six types; namely, material process, mental process, relational process,verbal process, behavioral process and existential process. The choices of processes depend on the speaker’s communicative intension and his/her perception on the event.Therefore, the selected process is culturally, politically and ideologically significant.At present, most of the critical analysis of news text in the mainland focuses onpolitical or economical texts, because, to some extent, ideology of these texts is moreapparent. It is rare to read any thesis for a critical analysis to both extreme weather andterrorist attack in terms of transitivity. Under the framework of CDA, this thesis will makea critical analysis of the four selected news texts on the basis of transitivity system inHalliday’s SFG, in doing so unraveling ideology embedded in news texts.Critical analysis of the same event by different media in different countries hastestified that transitivity process is an effective analytical tool of CDA research. It can beapplied not only in literary works but also in news texts. Furthermore, ideology exists innews texts in a wide range. The different choices of processes can embody differentideologies. The main different processes employed in news texts are material process,verbal process and relational process. And still further, driven by politics, economy andculture in the modern society, language reflects power and ideology of different politicalgroups and interest institutions.