Analyzing the Media - A Systemic Functional Approach - Martin Kaltenbacher

Analyzing the Media - A Systemic Functional Approach - Martin Kaltenbacher

English News texts in the Light of Authorial Orientation: A Classification of Subjective and Objecive Text Types Based on the System of Modality

Analyzing the Media - A Systemic Functional Approach - Martin Kaltenbacher

Martin Kaltenbacher [+-]
University of Salzburg
Martin Kaltenbacher is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria. In his research, he applies methods of Systemic Functional Linguistics and corpus linguistics to media discourse, language of tourism and news commentary. He co-edited books on Multimodality (Ventola, E., Charles, C., Kaltenbacher, M. Perspectives on Multimodality, Benjamins) and on Discourse Studies (Gruber, H., Kaltenbacher, M., Muntigl, P. Empirical Approaches to Discourse Analysis, Peter Lang). For the past three years he has been collaborating on a corpus based, international project called Styles of Persuasion in Europe, the aim of which is to explore similarities and differences in newspaper commentary across more than 200 European newspapers from 13 different European countries.

Description

Newspapers host a range of different text types that contribute to a paper's coverage of a particular piece of news. These include, e.g., reports, analyses, comments, editorials, columns and letters/emails to the editor. As the landscape in the printed press has undergone considerable changes over the past decades, it has been argued that the boundaries between different newspaper text types have been shifted, blurred or even abolished. This chapter shows, however, that the boundaries between informative and commenting newspaper genres remain solid and intact. The study is grounded on an analytic method based on grammatical structure rather than on semantic or pragmatic criteria. The grammatical system used for analysis here is Modality (Halliday 1994), and the primary focus has been laid on the choice of modal expressions in terms of their authorial orientation and manifestation in the four categories explicit-subjective, implicit-subjective, implicit-objective and explicit-objective. The results indicate that newspaper genres – at least in the quality press – can be clearly delineated in terms of the subjective/objective modal orientation patterns chosen by the authors.

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Citation

Kaltenbacher, Martin. English News texts in the Light of Authorial Orientation: A Classification of Subjective and Objecive Text Types Based on the System of Modality. Analyzing the Media - A Systemic Functional Approach. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 131-147 Sep 2019. ISBN 9781781796269. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=32954. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.32954. Sep 2019

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