摘要：

讣告报道又被称作死亡报道，是通知死亡的一种文本，是一项特殊的新闻文体写作。Halliday提出的系统功能语法是一种框架严密的理论体系。及物性是系统功能语法中三大元功能之一的概念功能的重要组成部分。该文试从及物性系统的角度引入，从用词，句子和语篇等方面来对中西两篇有关名人的讣闻报道进行比较，并从中探索中西方不同的价值取向与死亡观。

关键词：讣告报道，及物性系统，对比分析
 
Abstract：

The obituary report is called the death report, which is a text to notice the death and a special style of news writing. Halliday’s functional grammar is believed to be a theoretical system with a rigorous framework. The transitivity system is an important part of ideational function which is one of three major meta-functions. This paper tries to introduce the transitivity system, and makes a certain comparative analysis between Chinese and Western obituary in terms of the celebrity from special terms, sentence structure and text. Then it further discusses the different value orientation and view of death in China and Occident.

Key words：obituary report; transitivity system; comparative analysis

1 Introduction
    The obituary is a necessary part in our daily writing. However, up till the present moment, the newspapers with obituary pages in China are just The Beijing News and Nanfang City News. By contrast, there are many newspapers paying a lot of attention to the obituary in western countries, such as three magnates in the United Station: New York Times, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times; and major newspapers in the United Kingdom are: Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent and The Times.
Because of different cognitive attitudes between Chinese and Occidental people, there are different features in obituaries. Starting from the transitivity system, this paper focuses on making a certain comparative research about the feature differences of the obituary report between China and West from terms, sentence structure and text and research the different value orientation and view of death in China and Occident.
With these purposes, this paper unfolds with these defining questions as follows: (a) Do the Chinese obituary report as well as the Occidental one tells the truth of the dead experience or comment objectively? (b) From the value, when talking about the death, what‘s the relation between the human and the nature? (c) How are the different views of death expressed in the obituary reports?