Verbal processes in news reports in Spanish

Fortaleza

Congreso; VI Congreso ALSFAL (Asociación Latinoamericana de Lingüística Sistémico-Funcional); 2010

Universidade Estadual do Ceará (UECE)

In this presentation, we will report on the findings from a small-scale study that examines how verbal processes are deployed in news reports written in Spanish. Verbal clauses fulfill various discourse functions and thus allow text producers not only to attribute information to sources but also to evaluate the sayer's attitude through the choice of different verbal processes (Martin & Rose, 2003). In addition, the way in which the projection is presented in discourse is meaningful in that it can reveal or hide the text producer?s stance and, at the same time, might shape the interpretation of the message by the receiver. As noted by Halliday (1994), the choice between quoting and reporting in not merely a choice between two structural realizations but a choice in terms of meaning. Keeping this in mind, we will explore the roles these two realizations play in journalistic discourse produced in Spanish. To conduct the study we will first identify all instances of verbal processes in relation to other process types and compare their frequency of occurrence in a set of news reports. As a second step, we will focus on the verbal forms that realize different ways of saying and how these forms behave in this type of discourse. In other words, we will examine the recurrence of verbal processes that reporters use to attribute information to sources, the ways in which the participants are realized, the types of projected clauses, and the functions that the latter perform. The news articles that make up the study´s data set are eighteen news reports published in Spanish in the on-line version of BBC Mundo. The articles were selected on the basis that they all report on the same event: the oil spill that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. They were collected throughout a two-month period after the accident. This study aims to be one more contribution to the Systemics Across Languages Project, whose main objective is to describe a range of languages and their typological relationships using systemic functional theory.