Transitivity and lexical cohesion: Press representations of a political disaster and its actors

Using The New York Times’ and China Daily's reports of the NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia in May 1999 as examples, this article aims to unravel the processes of representing the event and its social actors in news texts. The article focuses on investigating the relations between choices of certain linguistic forms and the ideologies and power relations which underlie such forms. Guided by assumptions of critical discourse analysis and drawing on the analytical framework offered in Michael Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, the article examines two dimensions of clause grammar: transitivity and lexical cohesion, which may be respectively associated with the ideational and textual functions of language. By analyzing aspects of clause grammar related to these two dimensions of language in news texts of different ideological orientations, the article shows that interpretations of the NATO bombing and of the roles of social actors involved in the bombing event are constructed in the specific choices that each newspaper makes in the two dimensions of text organization.