A Corpus Based Transitivity Analysis of Newspaper Articles on Floods
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61841/vpmc2m09Keywords:
Floods, Newspaper articles, transitivity analysisAbstract
aim of the current research is to explore distributions and functions of six processes of transitivity analysis in flood related Newspaper articles. No matter a country is developed, developing or under developed, floods bring drastic results in the whole world without discrimination. They are one of major causes of social unrest. Since, newspapers can be considered as a good and authentic source of information, so a small corpus of twenty (20) English newspaper articles addressing the issue of floods in Pakistan has been collected for the above purpose. Data was analyzed by transitivity analysis proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014). It has six functions which have been further subdivided into many functions to explore any text. This analysis helps out in finding writing patterns which are followed in writing newspaper articles on the topic of floods. This study explores which procedure they use to follow in order to convey such pieces of news and do they suggest possible strategies too to overcome them. The study reflects that material and mental processes remained more dominant in the data and with the help of them, usually media partners try to sensationalize the writings and blame government officials as responsible of this undesirable situation. Verbal, behavioral and existential processes have been used very little.
Downloads
References
1. Andersson, C. M., Bjärås, G., Tillgren, P., & Östenson, C. G. (2007). Local media monitoring in process evaluation. Experiences from the Stockholm Diabetes Prevention Programme. Journal of health communication, 12(3), 269-283.
2. Aslam, M. (2018). Flood Management Current State, Challenges and Prospects in Pakistan: A Review. Mehran University Research Journal of Engineering and Technology, 37(2), 297-314.
3. Baker, P., & Levon, E. (2015). Picking the right cherries? A comparison of corpus-based and qualitative analyses of news articles about masculinity. Discourse & Communication, 9(2), 221-236.
4. Bartley, L. V. (2018). “Justice demands that you find this man not guilty”: A transitivity analysis of the closing arguments of a rape case that resulted in a wrongful conviction. International Journal of Applied Linguistics.
5. Bartley, L., & Hidalgo-Tenorio, E. (2015). Constructing perceptions of sexual orientation: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis of transitivity in the Irish press. Estudios Irlandeses, 10, 14-34.
6. Ben Cheikh, S. A. (2017). Corpus-based Analysis of Transitivity English Newspaper Articles: The case of Ennahar, The Washington post and The New York Times (Doctoral dissertation).
7. Beji, Y. (2016). Transitivity and Context in Critical Discourse Analysis Case study: TAP headlines on regions in Tunisia. International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies (IJHCS), 2(4), 326-342.
8. Brinkley, D., & Brewer, K. (2006). The great deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and theMississippi gulf coast (p. 108). New York: Morrow.
9. Bloor, T., & Bloor, M. (2013). The functional analysis of English. Routledge.
10. Brownson, R. C., Mack, N. E., Nileeni, I. M., Pratt, M., Brownson, C. A., Dean, C., ... & Luke, D. A. (1996). Changes in newspaper coverage of cardiovascular health issues in conjunction with a community-based intervention. Health education research, 11(4), 479-486.
11. Caburnay, C. A., Kreuter, M. W., Luke, D. A., Logan, R. A., Jacobsen, H. A., Reddy, V. C., ... & Zayed,
H. R. (2003). The news on health behavior: coverage of diet, activity, and tobacco in local newspapers. Health education & behavior, 30(6), 709-722.
12. Carpenter, S. (2010). A study of content diversity in online citizen journalism and online newspaper articles. New Media & Society, 12(7), 1064-1084.
13. Chen, Y., Syvitski, J. P., Gao, S., Overeem, I., & Kettner, A. J. (2012). Socio-economic impacts on flooding: a 4000-year history of the Yellow River, China. Ambio, 41(7), 682-698.
14. Collins, L. C., Jaspal, R., & Nerlich, B. (2017). Who or what has agency in the discussion of antimicrobial resistance in UK news media (2010–2015)? A transitivity analysis. Health:, 1363459317715777.
15. Emilia, E., Moecharam, N. Y., & Syifa, I. L. (2017). Gender in EFL Classroom: Transitivity Analysis in English Textbook for Indonesian Students. Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7(1), 206-214.
16. Emilia, E. (2016). Students’ critical thinking in writing a thesis using the transitivity system.Jurnal Ilmu Pendidikan, 17(2).
17. Ezzina, R. (2016). Transitivity Analysis of «The Crying lot of 49» by Thomas Pynchon. International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies (IJHCS), 2(3), 283-292.
18. Fowler, R. (1991). Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the press. New York: Routledge.
19. Garde-Hansen, J., McEwen, L., Holmes, A., & Jones, O. (2017). Sustainable flood memory: Remembering as resilience. Memory Studies, 10(4), 384-405.
20. Granner, M. L., Sharpe, P. A., Burroughs, E. L., Fields, R., & Hallenbeck, J. (2009). Newspaper content analysis in evaluation of a community-based participatory project to increase physicactivity. Health Education Research, 25(4), 656-667.
21. Halliday, A. K. (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nded.).London, Melbourne, Auckland: Edward Arnold.(p 101).
22. Halliday, M. A. K., & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar Arnold. A member of the Hodder Headline Group, 338.
23. Haraguchi, M., & Lall, U. (2013). Flood risks and impacts future research questions and implication to private investment decision-making for supply chain networks. Background paper prepared for the global assessment report on disaster risk reduction.
24. Isti'anah, A. (2014). Transitivity Analysis in Four Selected Opinions about Jakarta Governor Election. Journal of Language and Literature, 14(2), 163-175.
25. Izadi, F., & Saghaye-Biria, H. (2007). A discourse analysis of elite American newspaper editorials: The case of Iran’s nuclear program. Journal of communication inquiry, 31(2), 140-165.
26. Joseph, S., Sahai, A. K., Sharmila, S., Abhilash, S., Borah, N., Chattopadhyay, R., & Kumar, (2015). North Indian heavy rainfall event during June 2013: diagnostics and extended range prediction. Climate Dynamics, 44(7-8), 2049-2065.
27. Lin, K. H. Y., Yang, C., & Chen, H. H. (2007, July). What emotions do news articles trigger in their readers?. In Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (pp. 733-734). ACM.
28. Lock, G. (1996). Functional English grammar: An introduction for second language teachers. Cambridge University Press.
29. Lv, L., Hu, C., Guan, X., & Shi, Z. (2014). Research of Flood Control Regulation Based onDistributed Model in Luhun Reservoir, China. Earth Science Research, 4(1), 21.
30. Mahfouz, A. R. (2013). A critical discourse analysis of the police news story framing in two Egyptian newspapers before January 25 Revolution. European Scientific Journal, ESJ, 9(8).
31. Martius, O., Sodemann, H., Joos, H., Pfahl, S., Winschall, A., Croci-Maspoli, M., ... & Sedláček, J. (2013). The role of upper-level dynamics and surface processes for the Pakistan flood of July 2010. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 139(676), 1780-1797.
32. Merz, B., Aerts, J. C. J. H., Arnbjerg-Nielsen, K., Baldi, M., Becker, A., Bichet, A., ... Delgado, J. M. (2014). Floods and climate: emerging perspectives for flood risk assessment and management. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 14(7), 1921-1942.
33. Mortensen, L. (1992). A transitivity analysis of discourse in dementia of the Alzheimer's type.Journal of neurolinguistics, 7(4), 309-321.
34. Mustafa, D. (2003). Reinforcing vulnerability? Disaster relief, recovery, and response to the 2001 flood in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Global Environmental Change Part B: Environmental Hazards, 5(2), 71-82.
35. Nguyen, T. H. (2012). Transitivity analysis of heroic mother by Hoa Pham.International Journal of English Linguistics, 2 (4), 85-100.
36. Ong’onda, N. A. (2016). Transitivity Analysis of Newspaper Headlines on Terrorism Attack inKenya: A Case Study of Westgate Mall, Nairobi. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 6(9), 77-85.
37. Pietz, D. A. (2015). The Yellow River: The problem of water in modern China. HarvardUniversity Press.
38. Rahman, S. U. (2014). Impacts of flood on the lives and livelyhoods of people in Bangladesh: A case study of a village in Manikganj district (Doctoral dissertation, BRAC University).
39. Saf, B. (2009). Regional flood frequency analysis using L-moments for the West Mediterranean region of Turkey. Water Resources Management, 23(3), 531-551.
40. Solman, P., & Henderson, L. (2018). Flood disasters in the United Kingdom and India: A criticaldiscourse analysis of media reporting. Journalism, DOI: 1464884918762363.
41. Song, Z. (2013). Transitivity analysis of A Rose for Emily. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3(12), 2291.
42. Stryker, J. E., Moriarty, C. M., & Jensen, J. D. (2008). Effects of newspaper coverage on public knowledge about modifiable cancer risks. Health Communication, 23(4), 380-390.
43. Thompson, G. (2004). Introducing functional grammar. (2nd ed.). New York: Arnold.
44. Tripathi, P. (2015). Flood disaster in India: an analysis of trend and preparedness. Interdiscip J Contemp Res, 2(4), 91-98.
45. Woodward, J. L. (1934). Quantitative newspaper analysis as a technique of opinion research. Social Forces, 12(4), 526-537.
46. Yang, J., Wan, S., Deng, W., & Zhang, G. (2007). Water fluxes at a fluctuating water table and groundwater contributions to wheat water use in the lower Yellow River flood plain, China. Hydrological Processes: An International Journal, 21(6), 717-724.
47. Yin, H., & Li, C. (2001). Human impact on floods and flood disasters on the Yangtze River. Geomorphology, 41(2-3), 105-109.
48. Yousaf, Z., Adnan, M., & Ali, E. (2018). Analysis of PAK-US and INDO-US relations in Pakistani, Indian and American press. Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences (PJSS), 38(1), 166-180.
49. Yu, F., Chen, Z., Ren, X., & Yang, G. (2009). Analysis of historical floods on the Yangtze River, China: Characteristics and explanations. Geomorphology, 113(3-4), 210-216.
50. Zhao, M., & Zhang, Y. A. (2017). Transitivity Analysis of American President Donald J. Trump’s Inaugural Address. International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science, 5(5).
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
- The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.
Under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
Notices:
You do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation .
No warranties are given. The license may not give you all of the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.
