OLIVA LINARES MARÍA BELÉN
Congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
An Analysis of Verbal Processes and Sayers as Social Actors in Newspaper Articles
Lugar:
Santiago
Reunión:
Congreso; IX ALSFAL Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Lingüística Sistémico-Funcional de América Latina; 2013
Institución organizadora:
ALSFAL Asociación de Lingüística Sistémico-Funcional
Resumen:
It is interesting to analyse verbal processes since along with other linguistic elements they display the writer´s positioning when third parties´ projections are introduced into texts, either to align or distance themselves from propositions cited. We will analyse Hard News reports as this genre has a great social impact (White, 1997). Our corpus is made up of five Hard News reports taken from The New York Times and they deal with the same topic: the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. More specifically, we will consider how social actors are presented in Hard News reports according to van Leeuwen´s (1996) theory of the representation of social actors. The objectives that guide this research are: (1) to identify how much of the language in Hard News reports is cited from social actors and how much of the language is writer original; (2) to determine the semantic load that verbal processes have in Hard News reports; (3) to determine which specific social actors are quoted by reporters by considering van Leeuwen´s theory of social actors. Our preliminary results seem to indicate that the elements under analysis in (1), (2) and (3) contribute to creating readers´ perception of writer objectivity, and that the specific social actors cited in the above mentioned newspaper display its ideology.