Analysis Of Transitivity In Chinese And American News Reports On Trump's Visit To China From The Perspective Of CDA

Critical Discourse Analysis originated in the 1970 s put forward by Fairclough based on Critical Linguistics.It mainly focuses on social problems reflected in discourses produced by different classes,by which the hidden ideology,power relationship and imparity can be revealed.In addition,Critical Discourse Analysis stresses that social relationship is not only related to economic base but also to culture and ideology.Critical Discourse Analysis is also based on Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar which supposes that language is endowed with three meta-functions: ideational,personal and textual.It's the transitivity structure reflecting how people view the real world that realizes ideational function.Transitivity system involves six types of processes describing human's experience,and each process consists of different participants,processes and circumstantial elements.For news media,what kind of information is selected and how the information is reported can reveal different ideologies.Based on Halliday's transitivity theory,this paper conducted comparative analysis and discussed the transitivity processes in news reports about Trump's visit to China from November 8,2017 to 10 selected from China Daily and The New York Times.It mainly aims to explore and reveal what ideologies are hidden in the two news media and then tries to explain the reasons.This paper adopted qualitative and quantitative approach.First,based on the statistic results,the study found that there are only five types of transitivity processes applied by the two news media: Material,Relational,Verbal,Mental and Existential Process.Second,through comparing the distributions of the five processes in the two media,this thesis found that the participants and process verbs not only have similarities but also differences.Last,this thesis discussed how different participants and process verbs can reflect the ideologies and cultural differences that the two media have.From the research results,we may find that China Daily and The New York Times chose different participants and process verbs,which reflects their different ideologies.For China Daily,it mainly focuses on Sino-US friendly relationship and cooperative communication and how the two leaders interacted with each other.Besides,it also reported some news about Chinese cultures and people-to-people exchange.Moreover,the words are mostly neutral and positive,which can promote the two countries' harmonious development and increase mutual trust.For The New York Times,however,it mentioned much information related to trade and economy.It supposed that China may try to replace the United States' leading status in the world by trade war.What's more,the words are much more subjective and negative.Therefore,after studying the textual descriptive features,it is found that that the two news media have different ideologies.In line with critical analysis of transitivity processes in news discourses,this study has some implications for effective cross-cultural communication.It's not only helpful for improving readers' critical ability to read,but also benefits people to understand well the differences of ideologies embedded in various news discourses.