Abstract
While news reports and editorials may center on very similar experiential content, obviously, their purposes are very different: to inform in the case of the report, and to argue for a particular line of thought on a given situation in the editorial. This paper demonstrates how systemic functional linguistics (SFL) can highlight just how these different ends are achieved linguistically, focusing on the textual meta-function through Theme choice and through the use of textual adjuncts, and on the interpersonal meta-function, through choices in the system of APPRAISAL, especially through the sub-systems of ATTITUDE and ENGAGEMENT. Results from analysis of a news report and an editorial show that the editorial indeed does make recourse to more overtly present interpersonal devices; this is not to say that the news report disguises the authorial presence entirely, as textual devices, such as conjuncts like however, indicate what a writer’s expectations of his/her readers are.
Highlights
The written language offers a wide variety of grammatical tools to mediate an author’s intended message
We focus on the interpersonal and textual meta-functions to demonstrate the ways in which a news reporter and an editorialist make linguistic choices to express what is essentially the same, or similar, experiential content in very different ways, with seemingly different ends: to report or to persuade
We can speculate that if linguists traditionally view conjuncts such as and as providing links between linguistic units, and not commenting on propositions as in the case of disjuncts5, perhaps it is not too far fetched to assume that non-linguists use conjuncts in writing to signpost the way for their reader, without realizing the extent to which these signposts do provide interpersonal comment on propositions
Summary
The written language offers a wide variety of grammatical tools to mediate an author’s intended message. We have chosen two different texts with a similar subject matter, tension in the Middle East, a news article and an editorial piece from the New York Times, which were published on the same day. We use these to analyze the ways in which a reporter and an editorialist make choices in the textual component through Theme and textual adjunct choices, and in the interpersonal component through expressions of appraisal and use of modality, to show how these differing ways of writing the news can be achieved through language. Before turning to that demonstration, we provide some background on the SFL concepts that are used to carry out the analyses
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