The ideational (or experiential) metafunction is the language function that is used to categorize things in creating one's experience of the world, or world view. According to Halliday and Matthiessen, “there is no facet of human experience that cannot be transformed into meaning” and that “language provides a theory of human experience, and certain of the resources of the lexicogrammar of every language are dedicated to that function” (2014, 30, emphasis in original).
According to Halliday and Matthiessen, in English there is a fundamental difference in experience, which can be organized as the inner and outer experiences (2014, 214). Grammatically organized, the process types which roughly correspond to these inner and outer experiences are mental processes and material processes, respectively. An example of a clause with a material process could be “the protesters tried to push through a police line”, while “the protesters wanted to push through a police line” would be an example of a mental process (the verbal groups in bold are the processes mentioned).
Transitivity, is then a subsystem of the ideational metafunction, and is used to look at processes, or the classification of actions, or as Halliday and Matthiessen put it:
”The system of TRANSITIVITY provides the lexicogrammatical resources for construing a quantum of change in the flow of events as a figure – as a configuration of elements centred on a process. Processes are construed into a manageable set of PROCESS TYPES.”
(Halliday and Matthiessen 2014, 213, sic) The process types are as follows:
Material processes – these represent physical actions and happenings, such as kicking or throwing.
Mental processes – these processes represent the inner workings of the mind, or sensing, such as wanting or thinking.
Relational processes – these set relations between entities, for example ”Michael is a student” where the process is bolded; relational processes also attribute things to other things, e.g. ”Sarah has many books”; relational processes are closely related to material and mental processes.
Verbal processes – these processes represent speaking in various degrees.
Existential processes – these processes construe existence, and it is most often realized by the construct of ’there is something”.
Behavioral processes – these processes represent physiological or psychological behavior, Bloor and Bloor call these processes ”the grey area between material and mental processes” (2013, 129).
Each process type has three components: the process itself, realized by a verbal group; the participant(s) and circumstances. Each process type has a set of unique participants, for example, material processes have actors, who do the action, and goals, which are the targets of the action. Similarly mental processes have sensers and phenomena as their participants. As the study at hand will not look at circumstances, I will not discuss them any further.
One of the benefits of transitivity analysis is that the analyst is not aware of the whole picture when annotating the data. This makes the results more reliable as it reduces bias. However, the research design could be improved by having multiple analysts annotating the data, with a mediator to finalize the annotations. Transitivity analysis suits corpus studies as it is easy to operationalize and the computer aided corpus programs make it simple to handle large quantities of data. The transitivity analysis is also well-suited to examine representations of social actors because it can be applied to large data sets, such as corpora, thus limiting any possible researcher bias. Using UAM CorpusTools, the process types associated with African Americans can be found, thus answering the first research question of this study: how African Americans are represented. Not only can the processes be seen, African Americans’ agency can also be traced. For example, if African Americans are mainly found as the goals of material process types, it implies that African Americans are mainly subject to physical action and not the ones who are doing the action. When all the other process types are also taken into consideration, a fuller image of representation can be produced from the results of the analysis.
As the data set was quite large, I decided to leave out circumstances from the analysis. Arguably leaving the circumstances out of the analysis will not affect the results as Halliday notes that circumstances are optional:
Circumstantial elements are almost always optional augmentations of the clause rather than obligatory components. In contrast, participants are inherent in the process: every experiential type of clause has at least one participant and certain types have up to three participants […] While every clause has at least one participant, only certain clauses are augmented circumstantially. In text in general, the average number of circumstances per clause is roughly 0.45, but there is considerable difference among clauses belonging to the different process types (see Matthiessen, 1999, 2006a).
In addition to leaving out the circumstances, due to the size of the data again, only the clauses which included reference either to the police or African Americans were annotated and analyzed.
For this thesis, transitivity will be operationalized using annotations. The annotations are separated into three layers: processes, participants and role. The two first layers I have discussed above and the role layer will work to separate African American entities from police and authority entities. The three layers can then be compared and contrasted and subjected to statistical analysis. The details will be discussed in the Methods section.
7 Data
In this section I will first shortly discuss Fox News and CNN, then I will discuss and describe the corpus itself. Fox News and CNN were chosen for the subject of study for their reputation of being biased toward the Republican party and the Democrat party, respectively (Iyengar and Hahn 2009; Morris 2005).
Much of the research done on the two media companies however focus on their television broadcasts instead of online reporting. Nonetheless, they do give insight to their general editorial stance. Based on the previous research, it seems that neither media organization is neutral, in that both have political leanings either to the Republican party side or the Democratic party side. Not only do they seem to have political leanings, but arguably both media may benefit from the partisan arrangement, i.e. both Fox and CNN have an agenda to promote their chosen party politics.