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Critically Analysing Newspaper Discourse : A Study of Representation of Ideological Approaches in British Broadsheet Newspapers

This is a linguistic study that focuses on language use in four British newspapers that are well known in Britain for their political positions. The main aim of this essay is to compare and con-trast different British newspapers in order to show how meaning is created and to identify any differences, depending on the discourse. To do this, specific theoretical frameworks have been applied, including critical discourse analysis, semantics, pragmatics and stylistics in the analysis of a number of different British newspapers. The analysis has shown that most of the interactions are used in all of the articles. Journalists have expressed many of the same arguments in their articles. The analysis showed that the arti-cles had many features in common and they require the reader to have a general political aware-ness as well as an understanding of the political leanings of the respective publications. It was discovered that the main difference in the articles is that they deviate from one another in how they present, interpret and relay topical and potentially controversial issues according to their leanings. The articles refer to the same stories and rely upon the same sources, but they pursue different angles, for example on national security, heritage and identity. These different ap-proaches mostly depend on the newspapers' and individual journalists' political leanings. There is a difference in which discoursal features, such as hegemony and subject positioning, are used, where they occur in the text and how frequently they occur. The determining factor for these differences appears to be, however, the nature of the topic and issues surrounding it rather than particular political affiliations of those responsible for producing it.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hh-36713
Date January 2018
CreatorsWerngren, Filippa
PublisherHögskolan i Halmstad, Akademin för lärande, humaniora och samhälle
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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