Systemic Functional Grammar Analysis of News Reports of Li Wenliang Incident
Based on a report on Dr. Li Wenliang in the British mainstream BBC media under the epidemic of Covid-2019, this paper analyzes from three perspectives guided by Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar: transitivity, mood and personal pronoun. It is found that the material process appears most frequently which shows that the news reports mainly reproduce the event process. The second is the verbal process, which shows that news reports are good at making use of multi-channel speech sources to enhance the authority and objectivity of reports. The third is the relational process and psychological process, which reflects the subtlety of news report content and the concealment of attitude. This paper reveals the ideological direction implied in the news reports through seemingly neutral and objective reports, aiming at providing reference for readers in the process of reading Chinese and foreign political discourse.