Comparative Study Of Transitivity Between Chinese And English News Reports Of Notre Dame Cathedral Fire

On April 15 th,2019,an unexpected fire attacked the Notre Dame Cathedral,which is regarded as the landmark of Paris,and mass media at home and abroad reported it in succession.This paper makes a study of Notre Dame Cathedral fire reported by Chinese and Western leading media on the basis of transitivity.Comparing the distribution and frequency of processes of Chinese and English samples,the differences of implicit sociology are acquired so as to understand connotation of Chinese and English news reports better.This paper is based on the transitivity of Systemic Functional Linguistics,employing quantitative research and corpus analysis,from the perspective of transitivity.On the one hand,the transitivity is to be applied to the analysis of Chinese practical writing;on the other hand,a comparative study with transitivity is to be made on the same events of the same genres.It mainly focuses on the figuring-out questions: 1)What types of processes are there in the Chinese and English news reports of Notre Dame Cathedral fire? 2)What are the differences and similarities of processes between the Chinese and English news reports of Notre Dame Cathedral fire? 3)From the perspective of the transitivity process,what are the different features between Chinese and Western news reports and the different social ideologies implied?To solve the above problems,first and foremost,on the basis of transitivity,all the six types of process,including the material process,the verbal process,the relational process,the mental process,the existential process and the behavioral process,should be found in both Chinese and English news reports by analyzing the processes of 2019 news reports of Notre Dame Cathedral fire by Chinese and Western leading media.Then this paper makes the comparison between the distribution of processes of Chinese and English news reports,similarly,it can be concluded that the material process takes up the largest proportion while the behavioral process takes up the least proportion.Differently,the proportion of the behavioral process in Chinese news reports is greater than that in English ones.And due to the structural differences of Chinese and English,there are several differences in the relational process.Finally,the differences of reporting style lie in that the Chinese media pursue the humanism and people-oriented concept.Therefore,the Chinese reporters focus on what people have done during the fire disaster.However,the Western media adhere to exploring values behind news reports and focus on the damages caused by the fire disaster and the recurring horrible scenes during the fire disaster.This paper carries out a comparison between Chinese and English news reports of Notre Dame Cathedral fire from the perspective of transitivity to enhance the readers’ insight into the deep connotation meanings of news reports,and is expected to inspire more thoughts and enlightenment to the people engaged in the field of journalism.