An Analysis of the Construction of Epidemic Discourse in “Together” from the Perspective of Transitivity

The Chinese and English lyrics of the anti-epidemic song Together are employed as the research corpus of the paper. The sentences of the two types of lyrics are analyzed from the perspective of systematic functional linguistics to explore people’s attitudes toward COVID-19 pandemic in the post-epidemic era and the language differences between Chinese and English. Findings show that: on the one hand, although people have mentalities of helplessness and evasion about the epidemic, they have shown a positive and optimistic attitude toward it on the whole; on the other hand, there are many differences between Chinese and English languages: (1) Chinese emphasizes parataxis while English emphasizes hypotaxis; (2) Chinese uses animate subject, English uses inanimate subject; (3) Chinese uses more dynamic sentence, English uses more static sentence; (4) Chinese uses more simple sentences, English uses more complex sentences; (5) Chinese uses more null subjects while English uses more formal subjects. It is found that transitivity system contributes to provide a unique research perspective to do research on epidemic-related discourse analysis.