A diachronic corpus-based study on the construction of regional image in Western mainstream media—a case analysis of Henan province in China

Drawing on a diachronic corpus of Henan-related reports from 2006 to 2025, this study examines how the province is discursively constructed in Western mainstream media by integrating text mining with a transitivity-based social role analysis. Leximancer 5.0 was employed to map semantic themes across the two periods, and material process clauses were analyzed to identify Henan's Actor-Goal configurations within the transitivity framework. The thematic analysis reveals both continuity and change, with crisis-oriented themes continuing to dominate, accompanied by a shift toward urban-economic themes and reduced cultural visibility. The transitivity analysis reveals a pronounced diachronic shift in Henan's social-role configuration, as it transitions from being primarily Goal-positioned in 2006-2015 to predominantly Actor-positioned in 2016-2025, with the dominant Actor role shifting from Destructor to Doer and the Helped role declining substantially, which together strengthen Henan's discursively constructed agency. Overall, the findings illustrate how the combined analysis of thematic patterns and transitivity-based role configurations can trace the diachronic evolution of Henan's discursive representation in Western media.