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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 21:4 (2016) ► pp.465–498

A corpus-based approach to transitivity analysis at grammatical and conceptual levels

A case study of South Korean newspaper discourse

| Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

The paper aims to demonstrate the usefulness of a novel corpus-based approach to analyzing Halliday’s transitivity for application to critical discourse analysis (CDA). The approach expands transitivity analysis beyond the traditional profiling of participant roles and process types at grammatical level to conceptual subcategorization, in light of the fact that CDA researchers often end up delving into the meanings of individual processes as part of their transitivity analyses. The paper introduces a scheme for annotating transitivity both at grammatical and conceptual levels on the basis of Halliday & Matthiessen (2004) and applies it to a case study examining news reports from two ideologically opposed South Korean newspapers on a nationwide public movement against US beef imports. The analysis reveals that the two newspapers contrast with each other in representing the riot police and the demonstrators as Actor and Goal in material processes grammatically and in processes of violence conceptually.

Keywords: transitivity, South Korean newspaper discourse, systemic functional grammar, critical discourse analysis, conceptual analysis of processes
Published online: 6 December 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.21.4.02lee
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