Critical Discourse Analysis Of Transitivity In TV Talk Shows

Critical Discourse Analysis is also called critical linguistics. It appeared in the1970s, and has undergone a tremendous development in recent decades. It could be a kind approach which was used to analyze public discourse in TV shows, newspapers, advertisements and so forth. Through Critical Discourse Analysis, a possible subjectivity, tendency, ideology and intention can be recognized apparently.TV talk shows, as a kind of media, have a strong influence on people’s knowledge, values, beliefs, and even the social relations and so on. And this kind of influence has a great extent on the use of language. Under this big background, critical acceptance becomes very necessary. So the talk show is one of the interests in the area of critical discourse analysis. Based on this point, this thesis chooses Critical Discourse Analysis as the perspective, and takes Fairclough’s three-dimension discourse analysis model as the theoretical basis, and it mainly uses the transitivity theory as the critical analysis tool to analyze8episodes of the HARDtalk taken out of BBC in2013, which aims to explore the hidden internal relationship of ideology and power in the relevant words in discourses concerned.This paper makes a Critical Discourse Analysis of HARDtalk in terms of transitivity in order to explore the power relation and ideology hidden in the talk, and through detailed Critical Discourse Analysis, one can really understand some internal meanings which can hide speakers’ real intention, ideology or thought. This thesis has two conclusions. Firstly it is a kind of dialectical relationship in social and political utterances specifically between language and ideology. On the one side, ideology can be found in the utterance of the speakers with different backgrounds and on the other hand language can reflect people’s ideology. Secondly, the biggest difference of the transitivity processes in the English talk show conversation are the material process, verbal process and relational process, occasionally also use the mental process, existential process and behavioral process.Significances can be found in this thesis both in theoretical and practical aspects. In this thesis, not only does the explaining power of linguistic theories like Fairclough’s three-dimensional Framework and transitivity prove appropriately, but also the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis extends its research scope, from newspapers, advertisements to HARDtalk, and the research scope considering to critical analysis is becoming wider and wider. This kind of research approach adopted in analyzing the HARDtalk from BBC also show the author creative attempt and is offered as a new research method for ideological study of different discourses. The other kind of significance is related to the practical end, which can be applied for the public to appreciate different TV shows, cross talk and so on with an objective attitude and recognize the inside relationship among different discourses, ideology and power. Though some limitations in this study are inevitable, the author hopes to make contribution for further study of discourses with critical analysis in the future.