News as social discourse: A functional-generative perspective.

摘要

This study examines the linguistic means by which perspective as a reflection of underlying ideologies may be manifested in news reports. The corpus consists of three articles reporting the same event which were selected from the three major Toronto newspapers: The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Toronto Sun.;The thesis is divided into two main sections. Section I is a detailed description of the theoretical framework. It presents an attempt to synthesize Michael Gregory's Communication Linguistics which stems from the Systemic-Functional tradition, with Noam Chomsky's Principles and Parameters Theory which belongs to the Transformational-Generative tradition. Section II provides a detailed analysis of the syntactic and semantic features of the texts by means of phasal analysis. The last part of this section is a catalysis which explains the relevance of the syntactic and semantic features to the phenomenon of perspective.;The aims of the description are twofold. First, it considers perspective a linguistic phenomenon, and defines it according to the descriptive constructs of a theoretical framework. Second, it investigates the dynamic process of news reports, and explicitly describes the linguistic patterns which may create and reflect underlying ideologies in a manner that makes the findings accessible to replicable and viable statements.