| Discourse analysis based on Halliday’s transitivity system is a research approach in which clauses are taken as the units for analysis and categorized into material process, mental process, relational process, verbal process, behavioral process and existential process, and discussions of the relevant participants and circumstantial elements are included as well. The earlier transitivity studies were mainly on the literary works. With the improvement of the theoretical framework and deeper investigation into its applications, transitivity system has been used in discourse analyses of different genres as an important tool, in which news discourses are included.Along with the development of society and the growing demand of information sharing mass media experience a rapid expansion and news has been an important way for people to get information and know about the world. However, as a medium for the dissemination of information between news media and audience, news does not only convey information about events, but also present certain ideologies, which can influence readers’ cognition, values and other aspects. Therefore, researches on the hidden ideologies in news reports have been gradually drawing the attention of linguists. And in this thesis, transitivity system is employed in discourse analysis of news concerning Ukrainian crisis to reveal the hidden ideologies.The ongoing Ukrainian crisis attracts the attention and concern of news media and people worldwide, which started since November,2013. This crisis mainly involves Ukraine, Russia, America and its European allies. It has a profound impact on those three parties mentioned above and also brings some effects on other regions or countries. In this thesis, the author carried out a comparative study on transitivity with American and Russian English news concerning Ukrainian crisis as the research object and six news discourses from USA Today and TASS as the samples. These selected news discourses involve three significant and influential events of Ukrainian crisis, the Kiev clash, Crimean referendum and the referendums of Donetsk and Lugansk.This study is undertaken in quantitative and qualitative approaches. Firstly, clauses are categorized into the corresponding processes, and statistics of the processes are collected and analyzed. Then clauses with comparative features in the samples from those two news media are analyzed. All these are done aiming to solve these following questions:(1) What are the characteristics of the distribution of transitivity processes in American and Russian news? (2) What ideologies are embedded in the news discourses? (3) How are the hidden ideologies reflected through transitivity processes?By analyzing the samples, the author drew some conclusions shown as follows. Distinctions in the distributions of transitivity processes exist between the news discourses from American and Russian media. The hidden ideologies of each medium embedded in the Ukrainian crisis-related news are consistent with the predominant political position of its own country, and the implicit ideologies are reflected mainly through the choices of process types and the participants. Detailed findings are provided below. Material processes involve physical actions and mainly present specific deeds. The basic requirement of news is to inform readers of the occurrence and the process of an event. Therefore, it naturally determines a dominance of material processes. And the choices of process types and participants in clauses of material process can reflect the differences of the hidden ideologies between American and Russian media. Verbal processes include direct and indirect quotations. Generally news conveys information of reported events as well as views from involved parties or the public. Thus verbal processes are also hired frequently in news. And the proportions of the participants and the quoted content in verbal processes also indicate the different ideologies of news media. Mental and relational processes primarily appear in comments and the quotations, expressing people’s position and attitude towards the reported events or certain deeds. Therein, relational processes are also adopted in the background introduction of certain event and the relationship of the involved parties for this process type can present the relationship between two entities. Behavioral processes, which relate to specifically human physiological processes, do not tally with the conciseness and solemnity requirements of news language. And existential processes, which essentially express the existence of an entity, make fewer contributions to the reporting of an event or to the expression of people’s attitude and position, compared with other processes. Therefore, these two processes are infrequently employed in news discourses.The aims of this transitivity study on news concerning Ukrainian crisis from American and Russian media are to further confirm the explanatory function of transitivity in news discourses and the feasibility of this kind of researches, and reveal the ideologies embedded in news language by probing into the distribution of transitivity processes as well as the choices of the transitivity components within specific clauses with the hope to improve readers’ sensitivity and dialectical thinking on news or other mass discourses as well as better their awareness of the ideological control of mass media. |
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