Description
This thesis presents the findings of a linguistic analysis on newspaper reports from three different countries focusing on the different perspectives represented. The analysis employed is informed by systemic functional linguistics and utilizes the framework of transitivity analysis, which identifies ideational meanings realized by grammatical choices. Newspaper reports are commonly believed to represent facts in a neutral way. However, previous studies have pointed out that events are always interpreted by the writers before being represented in texts. Because of their ability to influence public opinion, newspaper reports have been the focus of several studies. Previous studies on newspaper reports using systemic functional linguistics have considered the relationships between linguistic choices and the representation of events. Though many studies on ideational meanings in newspaper reports have considered different perspectives realized by linguistic choices, few studies have investigated newspaper reports from multiple countries written in more than one language. Thus, this thesis investigates newspaper reports published in Australia, the United States, and Japan, which include articles written in English and Japanese. These cross-linguistic sets of newspaper reports were written about a specific issue where we can assume that these three countries would maintain different stances. The aim of this study is to locate different perspectives expressed by grammatical choices in the newspaper reports and to identify the strategies that the writers employed in expressing their stances in the newspapers. Based on the framework of transitivity analysis, process types and participants were identified in all the main clauses and subordinate clauses in the newspaper reports. Participants were further categorized with according to their affiliations, institutions, and their human or non-human nature. In addition, material and verbal processes were further analyzed according to their verb types, and the participants who were involved in each type of processes were identified. The findings of this analysis revealed linguistic strategies that may not be obvious to the readers, yet influence the news reports to reflect the writers' perspectives on the events. Australian reports utilized Japanese actors in negative material processes and showed positive inclinations to their anti-whaling stance. The US news reports featured the anti-whaling groups as actors and goals, and these choices also seemed to imply their anti-whaling stance. In contrast, the Japanese reports featured the Japanese government as actors and the Japanese officials as sayers and favored their pro-whaling stance. These findings show that the grammatical choices in newspaper reports played a role to covertly express the writers' perspectives toward the events and suggest that the readers could be affected by those linguistic manipulations in their opinion making process if they continue receiving input from one specific source.
