Transitive Analysis,Ergative Analysis and Their Applications in Critical Discourse Analysis

This article first gives a general review of different views of transitive and ergative analyses in systemic functional linguistics and other related studies.Then it discusses their potential contribution to critical discourse analysis by giving a critical discourse analysis of the representations of smog in Beijing Times.It argues that both transitive and ergative analyses have their own strengths and can enrich the analytic tools of critical discourse analysis in exposing the ideologies behind texts if they are properly applied.