A Comparative Study Of Transitivity In Chinese And English News Reports On Tariff War Based On The Modes Of Thinking

Trade frictions between China and the United States have persisted over the years.In March 2018,US President Trump signed a memorandum,announcing the imposition of tariffs on 60 billion U.S.dollars goods imported from China,and escalating the friction into a tariff war.This has a profound impact on the economy of the two countries and even other countries in the world.News is a social being,influenced by society,and affecting the society.This paper selects 20 news reports,10 from Chinese reports,and 10 from American reports,coming from The Washington Post and The New York Times in America and The Xinhua News Agency and People’s Daily in China.By analyzing the real corpas,and by means of statistical methods,this paper tries to reveal its characteristics of transitivity.A clear understanding of the distribution and application of transitivity system is an important step of analyzing and interpreting the implicit meaning of news discourse.After a detailed analysis,it is possible to draw the similarities and differences of the language features of Chinese and American news reports and to explore the reasons for similarities and differences according to the results.Therefore,it is significant and valuable to research the news reports of Sino-US tariff war employing the theory of transitivity.Transitive system is not only an important part of Halliday’s Systemic Function Linguistics,but also an important means of discourse analysis.From the perspective of transitivity,through the analysis of news reports from both sides,it can be concluded: Material Process,Verbal Process,Relational Process,Mental Process and Existential Process are applied in both Chinese and American reports.In addition,the US report also uses very few Behavioral Processes.Among them,Material Process is the largest proportion in both reports.There was no significant difference in the distribution of Mental Processes and Existential Process.However,the usage of Verbal Process and the Relational Process is quite different.According to the analysis of similarities and differences with the theory of Modes of Thinking,the author notes that the commonality of language and the style of journalism have resulted in the similarities of Chinese and American reports,and Chinese Subjective,Holistic thinking caused more Relation Process,and less Material Process and Verbal Processes,American Objective and Analytic Thought caused more Material Process,less Relational Process.In addition,Inductive Thought is the reason for the underdeveloped grammatical system of Chinese,so there are unconventional structures in the transitivity process of Chinese reports.This study has an enlightening effect on the writing of English news reports,and it is conducive to a better understanding of the differences between Chinese and western thinking patterns,which is helpful for cross-cultural communication.In addition,it helps give a more comprehensive and objective understanding of the tariff war and help adjust transitivity strategies to cope with the impact of the American media.