Analysis of linguistic features in reports of a political event : the Falklands War as a case study

The study reported in this thesis investigated the differences and similarities in the use of linguistic features by three English newspapers in the reports of the Falklands Conflict (1982). The aim was to assess the influence of ideological positions in the language used. The study describes discourse structure and specific forms which characterise some texts of the reports analysed. The purpose was to identify some salient features of what readers receive as an input while reading the news. The argument in this study is that identification of linguistic patterns that characterise newstexts must be uncovered not only to facilitate comprehension, newstexts being subjects to language constraints at the level of micro-structure but also to facilitate the understanding of the logic of their structure at the level of macro-structure. Our hypothesis is that there is no neutrality or neutral representation in newspaper supposedly factual re ports and this is even more obvious when we are in a situation ot conflict, because there is a predominance of patriotic feelings. It was discovered that although the texts analysed come from different discursive formations, there is some form of homogeneity in the use of certain stylistic features, and categories of participants occuring as agents or affected. The results of phase one of the analysis shows little differences in the way the three newspapers studied vary in the reports of a single event. The evaluation of verb-processes and their distribution with the categories of participants in the texts displays some neutrality on the part of the Guardian, but the semantic moves ‘generalisation’ and ‘nominalisation’ are frequent in the three newspapers reports. Our conclusion is that the type of ‘ideological competence’ shown by the three newspapers implies a certain neutralisation of the differences shown elsewhere. A number of theoretical and methodological issues are given an extensive treatment to understand the background of theories of language within the context of society. In this study, I have adopted the linguistic approach of Fowler, Trew, Kress and Ilodge (1979) for our analysis of the reports of the Falklands War with an extension of the semantic evaluation of processes of action verbs, mental speech acts in relation to their occurrence with animate or inanimate categories in agents or affected semantic roles. The conclusions describe the variations marking the differences in social meetings as vehiculated by the forms and their distributions in the texts studied.