Wuhan’s Identity Construction In The News Headlines From The Global Times During The Epidemic

This thesis focuses on the news headlines containing the word Wuhan published in the Global Times within one year(2020.02-2021.02)since the World Health Organization officially announced the naming of COVID-19 with the aim to analyze how these headlines construct Wuhan’s identity from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics and provide implications for exploring identity construction of other places and improving the writing of relevant news headlines.The present study combines the ideational systems of ENTITY and TRANSITIVITY,and the interpersonal system of ATTITUDE as the basic research tools to examine the selected 450 news headlines.This thesis began identifying word groups or phrases containing Wuhan in the headlines as the key terms and classifying them in terms of ENTITY.Then the headline clauses with the key entities were analyzed in terms of the TRANSITIVITY process type and the frequency of these entities acting as different grammatical functions was counted.Thirdly,this project examined the headlines in terms of ATTITUDE before using the notion of coupling to investigate how the key entities were combined with specific attitudinal meanings to construct Wuhan’s identity.At the ENTITY level,this research found that the relationship between the studied entities was composition,with “semiotic: institution”,“conscious”,and“material: abstraction” types being the three most frequently appeared ones in the collected data.At the level of TRANSITIVITY,the Global Times frequently placed key entities related to Wuhan in the position of the Actor and the Goal in material process,successfully building Wuhan into an active anti epidemic city,an advocate and promoter of joint anti epidemic activity as well as a recipient of support from other cities and countries.In addition,at the level of ATTITUDE and the multiple couplings formed by the attitudinal values and key entities,when the media constructed the “semiotic: institution” ideation of Wuhan,the affect and judgment evaluations coupled with it were mostly positive,but the appreciation were mixed,describing positive evaluations of Wuhan’s restoration,and negative evaluations of the impact of the epidemic in Wuhan.When “conscious” entities such as Wuhan people were constructed,the attitudes,affect and judgement,coupled with these entities were in both positive and negative.Finally,with regard to the Wuhan lockdown decision and other related “material: abstraction” entities,the coupled attitude was mainly positive appreciation,highly praising the relevant decisions made by the state and government during the anti-epidemic period.All of the couplings conveyed the following information: Faced with the epidemic,Wuhan undoubtedly experienced the darkest moment,but it has strong anti-epidemic ability and self-healing ability.As far as its citizens are concerned,they are always adhered to the principle of life first.Moreover,Wuhan is willing to share its anti-epidemic experience with the world,always actively advocating and working hard to build a good and friendly national and international environment.