A breviloquent analysis of New York Times’ discursive-functional features: A functional linguistic perspective

Newspapers are among the most available texts that are read in various modes by all classes of people. The linguistic structures of news contexts are also special to serve ideological purposes. In the current study, we tried to track some discursive discursive features of four New York Times news reports on chemical weapons in terms of the function of modalities, hedges, stances, transivity, nominalizations, and predication. These elements can reveal important information about the agency of things and persons over a wide set of situations. We also tried to show how these discursive features in political news could help in either foregrounding or backgrounding an idea, a person, or a thing. A discourse analyst should thus attend to such linguistic cues, marked or unmarked, if he wishes to disclose the goal pursuits of the agents or news developers.

Keywords:

news reports , discourse , agents , foregrounding , discursive features