Estrutura temática do gênero reportagem na revista Veja e no jornal A Nova Democracia: o caso Santiago

Abstract

This research investigates the thematic choices of journalistic texts, specifically news, talking about the same event, but which are produced and published in different editorial lines. Our main goal with this study is to provide information so that paradigms still based on the dichotomy text and grammar at the basic school can be overcome, as well as to contribute to the promotion of a more critical and reflective teaching, so that students can socially act with autonomy. That is the reason why we have chosen as corpus two articles of ideologically antagonistic vehicles: the newspaper A Nova Democracia and Veja magazine. Considering that the context of culture and the context of situation are crucial to the language choices of the texts, we examine the thematic organization of the periods that make up the stories. The theoretical framework we have chosen is the systemic-functional grammar (SFG) of Halliday (1978; 1994; 2004), specifically focusing on the Theme function, which belongs to the Thematic Structure in Textual Metafunction, one of the levels of analysis of the SFG, which organizes the sentence as message and systematizes the ideational meanings. The specific objective of this study is therefore to analyze the extent to which ideological differences affect the thematic choices of texts. Having this goal in mind, we have dedicated ourselves to the analysis of Ideational Themes and their meanings because they are responsible for indicating the way how the authors prioritized information in the periods that make up and organize the messages contained in the texts. As a research method, we have noted and manually classified quantitative data. The results show that both texts have a high frequency of participant but semantically distinct Ideational Themes. As for processes and circumstances Ideational Themes, they show significant syntactic and semantic discrepancies, which reveal different representations of narrators facing the same event.