Abstract—From the perspective of Critical Discourse
Analysis, this study analyzes the transitivity in American
Think Tanks’ discourse in the Sino-US trade war. It uses
Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework model as the
theoretical framework and Halliday's theory of transitivity and
Van Dijk's theory of Ideology Square as analytical tools. The
corpus was selected from the experts’ comments on Sino-US
trade war published on the official website of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies from March 23, 2018 to
March 24, 2019. Major findings are as follows: experts in CSIS
use material (56.49%) and relational (26.62%) process most
frequently, followed by mental (7.79%), existential (5.84%)
and verbal (3.25%) process, with no behavioral process.
Experts in CSIS use material process and relational process
frequently in their comments, which indicates that they try to
expound the measures taken by both sides in the Sino-US trade
war and the impact of these measures on the development of
Sino-US trade war.
Index Terms—CDA, transitivity, ideology square, Sino-US
trade war.
The authors are with the School of Foreign Studies, Northwestern
Polytechnical University, China (e-mail: huangyicai@mail.nwpu.edu.cn,
xazhao@nwpu.edu.cn).
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Cite:Yicai Huang and Xueai Zhao, "A Study of Transitivity in the Sino-US Trade War Discourse from the Perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis — A Case Study of Center for Strategic and International Studies," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 152-159, 2022.