Transitivity in Philippine Sports Articles

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

Sports journalism has become a significant part of the life of Filipinos. In this article, the researcher sought to acquire a clear description of the transitivity system of sports articles that holistically guide readers and writers in clearly identifying its level of journalistic accuracy. Halliday (1985), as cited in Bustam (2011), stressed that transitivity system develops old conception about transitivity and verb meaning. Halliday divided the system of transitivity or process types into six processes, namely: material, mental, relational, behavioral, verbal, and existential.

METHODS

The researcher compiled prominent broadsheets within 2017 which are The Philippine Daily Inquirer, Manila Bulletin, The Philippine Star, and The Manila Times. The researcher collated 100 sports articles from the stated sources and conducted a two-round random stratified sampling. Each of the sports articles selected was taken as one stratum to ensure that the newspapers all had equal opportunities to be selected as sample sports news. A total of 50 sample sports news were thus randomly selected from all the issues of the newspapers published in 2017.

RESULTS

A total of 507 verbs were identified across printed and online newspapers such as Philippine Daily Inquirer, Manila Bulletin, Manila Times, and Philippine Star and all the six process types categorized by Halliday (2008) were found to have occurred in these sources. On the whole, the material process was the most frequently used process type in the sports articles collection, with a total occurrence of 334 (65.88%), followed by the relational process (72, 14.20%), the existential process (48, 9.47%), the verbal process, and behavioral process (19, 3.75%) and the mental process (15, 2.96%) in descending order of occurrence frequencies.

DISCUSSIONS

The researcher's analysis revealed that the transitivity structure contributes to the realization of the stylistic features of being objective, accurate, factual, and informative in journalistic sports writing. Generally speaking, the dominant use of the material process (65.88%) objectively showed its journalistic meaning. The relational process (14.20%) served as the complements of the description of the material process and supplies the readers with the information needed to understand the story. Together, the percentages of the material process and the relational process account for more than 70% which just reflect the important features of objectivity and informativeness of a sports article.