Discourse Analysis of News Texts by the Application of Systemic Functional Grammar

摘要

This study is an attempt to examine how two sample texts, both from English newspapers, are textualized differently so as to accomplish the writers' overall objective to persuade the readership of the validity of their respective argument. Although the two texts are from the same discourse domain (i.e. politics), they adopt rather different evaluative positions regarding the primary protagonists they are concerned with. By utilizing various aspects of Systemic Functional Grammar, this paper analyzed the texts in terms of their communicative functionality: that is, how each text seeks to deal with potentially contentious propositions, how it acts to win over readers to its particular evaluative position, and how its lexco-grammatical and text organizational choices serve to lend more or less covert support to the particular stance each writer adopts. The result not merely showed how skillfully the writers utilize various language resources to achieve their purposes but it also demonstrated how powerful analytical tools Systemic Functional Grammar can be in analyzing written discourse.