A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis Of Transitivity System In China’s And American News Reports On “Freedom Of Navigation”

Prior critical discourse analyses of news reports employed either qualitative or quantitative methods based on text data from a single source,either from China media or foreign ones,which made it difficult to draw a generalizable conclusion.In view of the above deficiencies,this thesis,adopts a mixed-method to analyze 240 China’s and American news reports on “freedom of navigation”,aiming to reveal the ideology hidden behind the linguistic features based on transitivity system.Three software tools were utilized in the analysis.UAM Corpus Tool 3.3 was employed for transitivity system’s annotation and descriptive statistics,KH Coder 3 to analyze the semantic theme represented by the transitivity system,and SPSS 26.0 to test the differences in the transitivity processes and various participants.The analysis mainly includes two parts--an overall analysis of six types of processes and a further analysis of each of the four major processes and their corresponding participants.The overall comparative analysis finds significant differences in the overall distribution of transitivity processes,particularly in the frequency distribution of material,verbal and relational processes.China’s news reports use more material and relational processes to express China’s determination to defend its territorial sovereignty by narrating objective facts,while American news reports use more verbal processes to portray its version “freedom of navigation” as an internationally recognized norm.The detailed analysis of each major process shows no significant differences in the sub-types of four major processes,while the distribution of participants shows significant differences.In the material and relational processes,China’s news reports tend to use military entities as participants to condemn the US hegemonism that infringes on China’s territorial sovereignty under the pretext of freedom of navigation,while the American news reports use more geopolitical entities as participants to prove that American style freedom of navigation is a legitimate act challenging China’s “excessive maritime claims”.In the verbal and mental processes,China’s news reports mainly cite Chinese official voices to emphasize China’s territorial sovereignty and integrity,and to commit to safeguarding the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea,while the American news reports draw attention to sources from a wide range of countries to frame up an international alliance resisting China’s legitimate claims.This corpus-assisted CDA based on transitivity reveals that transitivity processes and participant roles define the narratives of news reports,which reflect the underlying ideology.This finding may inform news report composition to properly use transitivity system to spread the Chinese voice in the international arena and boost readers’ critical reading of news reports by recognizing the underlying ideology.