A Linguistic Study of Topicalisation in Selected USA Newspapers: North Korea Nuclear Weapon as a Case Study

Abstract

This research focuses on surveying Topcalisation phenomenon in political texts, and investigating the utilizations of its types. It aims to inspect Topicalisation in construing various types of constructions in the texts of political discourse and display how this phenomenon can construe non-canonical and complex sentences' structures. To achieve these goals, Verma’s division (1976) of Topicalization types is adopted as a model of analysis. Additionally, Quirk et.al (1985) is adopted as a complementary modal. The data of the present study are 17 selected political editorials that are chosen in a random way from three of the most famous American newspapers: The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. According to Verma’s division, Topicalisaion types are divided into four basic types: passivization, pseudo-cleft, Cleft, and Extraposition. The study hypothesized that: Topicalisation transforms the syntactic construction of simple sentences into complex one, still it is utilized in political editorials in order to grant prominence to specific sentences' items to grab the attention of readers and convince him or her in a specific point of view. Cleft, which offers a highly levels of flexibility by drawing two or more sentences from a simple ones, is utilized heavily in political editorials. From a syntactic perspective, topicalisation supplies diverse syntactic structures, which have rhetorical effective. From a semantic perspective, It clarifies and unambiguously expresses the desired meaning. Data analysis has displayed that Topicalisation provides editorialists with various syntactic constructions for various purposes, involving pique the reader's interest and try to persuade him in a particular view. It has shown that passivization has been the most dominant type used in political discourse. In addition, the analysis has shown that syntactic and semantic aspects of Topicalisation phenomenon produce sentences with effective constructions and unambiguous meaning. The study comes up with the conclusion that Topicalisation has various structures which can serve various purposes. For example, when New piece of information appears at the beginning of the sentence, passivization process can be utilized to reorganize the sentence in order to agree with Given-New principle via postponing it.