Systemic Functional Linguistics and the Language of Journalism

Abstract

This paper is a new assessment of systemic Functional Grammar, a test to examine how SFG can reveal bias in media language, specifically the language used to report on hard news items about the clash between the so-called Muslim and Western worlds. SFG constitutes, then, another tool of research within the larger body of mass communication studies. It provides a better understanding of news language and opens new possibilities of reading news items. As Davies and Ravelli (1992: 03) put it, “the theory is illuminating our understanding of text and - at the same time - the theory is being refined by being tested against text: a dual process which in our view is what systemic linguistics is all about”. The disciplinary background of this paper is, thus, in the fields of linguistics and discourse analysis, but it also draws on a wider field of research on mass media.