| M.A.K.Halliday inherited and developed John Rupert Firth's theory of the London School and Halliday(1985)formally published An introduction to systemic functional grammar,marking the establishment of Systemic Functional Grammar,which is one of the most influential linguistic theories in the second half of the twentieth Century.Many experts and scholars abroad including Mathiessen,Martin,Fawcet also made a great contribution to perfect and develop the theory.Hu&Zhu&Zhang(1989)compiled An introduction to systemic functional language,which fills in the research gas of SFG and plays an inestimable role in the promotion and introduction to SFG at home.Halliday(1978,1985)presented that semantic system has three functions,ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.The three Metafunctions of SFG are widely used to analyze various discourses,and great achievements are made to analyze novel,speeches,scientific technological text and news reports etc.However,the research on Transitivity analysis of economic news reports is relatively rare and the depth and breadth is not enough.News reports are always the main research object of critical discourse analysis and linguistics.Reuters is one of the earliest established news agencies in the world,and it is also one of the largest news agencies in the UK and one of the four major news agencies in the West.Nominally,the Reuters is owned by the private business owners.In fact,it is under the control of the government and is the official mouthpiece of the United Kingdom.UK actively responded to “One Belt One Road” Initiatives as soon as it was put forward in 2013.Under the theoretical framework of Transitivity System in SFG,this thesis tries to analyze the news reports on “One Belt One Road Initiative”.The author downloads all the news reports from the Reuters' official website dated from June 2015 to April 2016.All the texts are used to build a corpus if the frequency of the theme “One belt One Road” Initiatives or “silk road economic belt and 21 th century maritime silk road” is no less than two.The self-built corpus is composed of 56 texts and 31007 words.Then all the clauses are classified by the corpora software according to Transitivity System.The thesis mainly answers three questions: 1)How is the Transitivity System applied in the reports? 2)How is the Transitivity processes distributed in Reuters' reports themed “One Belt One Road” Initiative? 3)What features of news language are reflected from the distribution of six processes in the reports? By the analysis of the texts and the data processed in the corpus software,the findings are as follows.First,the results indicate that Transitivity System can be concorded in the corpora,andeach of the subcategory of Transitivity is found in it.Second,there are 3915 transitivity processes in the 56 texts in total.Six processes' ratio and frequency are calculated that process respectively.Material process is the most frequently used process type with a total occurrence of(3086,78.86%),followed by relational process(491,12.55%),verbal process(241,6.2%),mental process(62,1.6%),existential process(29,0.74%)and finally behavioral process(6,0.05%).The proportion of material process means that the factual news reports have both the narrative and descriptive characteristics.Generally speaking,the processes in SFG bearing the descriptive meaning are relational process,existence process and mental process.And material process always expresses the narrative significance.This is consistent with the characteristics of news reports to reflect the objectivity of reality.Third,further attempts are made to describe some language features in lexicogrammar terms affected by the Transitivity System.The conciseness and cohesion effects can be realized by the transitivity metaphorization.The analysis of OBOR with the theory of transitivity has both theoretical and practical significance.Theoretically,it embodies the conception of SFG and highlights the representative function of OBOR texts.Meanwhile,it could validate the feasibility of the Transitivity System and its wide application.Practically,the study can provide a new perspective for both the news writers and readers to produce news texts.The choice of different transitivity process and transitivity metaphorization of OBOR could objectively and truly reflect the event of news reports.The analysis on Transitivity System helps to understand the choice of news language and the function it realizes,which leads to a better comprehension and a thorough grasp of the news characters. |
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