Any port in a storm: A systemic functional analysis of linguistic choices of representation in news texts.

This Master's Thesis aims to gain insight into how linguistic choices shape the representation of information in news stories. Because they involve decision by definition, choices have an effect on the news angles and consequentially on the content and the message conveyed in an article. Specific structures, such as passive sentences, are not only determined by simple stylistic preference, but are also the fruit of linguistic choices. The choice of such constructions in place of factually equivalent or similar ones, gives a sentence a particular direction and indicates a linguistic strategy in the (re)presentation of the facts and the speaker's attitude. A study on an integral aspect of language use such as linguistic choices applied to news stories is of particular interest because of the essential role language plays in media and communication in general. More specifically, the present thesis is situated in the particular context of foreign news reporting, which involves also editorial choices. The main theoretical framework of this study lies on systemic functional linguistics, from which the concept of linguistic choices originates, and discourse analysis, in its particular application to news texts. This study investigates linguistic choices through the systemic functional linguistic analysis of 8 articles, from 4 daily newspapers, that cover the adoption ban signed by President Putin in 2012. The selected newspapers consist in a set of American dailies and a set of British dailies. Each set contains a tabloid and a broadsheet. In addition to the examination of the focus of information that the linguistic choices reveal in the articles, this study also seeks to observe the differences and similarities between the dailies based on their nationality and on the type of newspaper. While the main focus of information is on political figures, the articles concentrate the attention on the thoughts and the feelings of other individuals involved in the adoption ban issue as well. Moreover, the study suggests that the use of the same language, or two varieties of a same language, results in similarities between the newspapers, despite of their nationality. It is the type of newspaper that marks a divergence in the corpora and points to different linguistic choices