The transitivity elements and ideology: a newspaper headlines analysis on MH370 flight accident

One of the language metafunctions is language as an ideational function. It concerns with the clause as representation. The choices of grammar structures in the newspaper, particularly newspaper headlines are varied and complex. Transitivity serves readers an impression of what happened in the news event by linking the three elements: processes, participants, and circumstances. This thesis is intended to reveal what transitivity processes, participants, and circumstances are found in the headlines of MH370 Flight Accident in The Jakarta Post, The Star, and China Daily. Further, this thesis also aims to interpret the language ideology implied in the headlines from the three newspapers. The analysis of this thesis is a qualitative research. The writer collected all the headlines related to MH370 Flight Accident from the official website of The Jakarta Post, The Star, and China Daily within a period of 8th March up to 30th April. After all the headlines were collected, the writer started to analyze the headlines under a theoretical framework of transitivity (processes, participants, and circumstances) and language ideology. After analyzing the data, the study revealed that in terms of processes, the highest percentage of process used in all the three newspapers is material process, followed by behavioral process, verbal process, relational process, mental process, and existential process. Meanwhile, in terms of circumstances, the highest percentage of circumstances used in all the three newspapers is cause, followed by location, matter, extent, accompaniment, manner, and role. The writer also found that there are several omissions of grammatical features in writing a headline done by a journalist. Further, the writer found that ideologies could be seen through ideological perspectives and lexicon. From the findings, it can be concluded that by applying transitivity in analyzing a text, it may reveal the model of verbs used by the journalist, build up a picture of participant(s)’ character(s) and setting(s) of a news under report, and further, provide a clear interpretation of perspectives in news headlines. Due to the limited time, the writer only focuses on one particular topic of news, MH370 Flight Accident. The future researches related to transitivity framework can be conducted with other written of spoken data. The writer also suggests that future researchers look at more various sources in discussing language ideology