On the transitivity analysis of communication processes in Argentine economic media discourse

Abstract

In the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, in the Cardiff model (Fawcett, 2000, 2008, 2011, forthcoming a, forthcoming b), we explore the transitivity system of communication processes in the economic media discourse in Spanish. In the Cardiff Grammar, verbal processes are conceived as a subset of mental processes of cognition and they have a configuration of three participant roles: Agent + AffectedCognizant + Phenomenon. The participant role Agent gives information or knowledge to an Affected who, thereafter, becomes Cognizant, and so comes to know of some Phenomenon. It is assumed that these three roles are inherent in this process type, i.e., they are required at the level of meaning, even if they are covert and sometimes unrealized at the level of form (Fawcett, in preparation a, in preparation b). In this paper, we analyze a subset (50 texts) of a corpus called DIDIECO (Economic Media Discourse), built according to the principles of Corpus Linguistics (Biber, 1993; McEnery & Wilson, 2001; Parodi, 2010). In order to annotate the corpus, syntactic and semantic analysis were made, applying verification tests (Fawcett, 2011) for participants roles. Our main purposes are: (i) distinguish criteria to identify members of the class “communication process”; (ii) determine the frequency of instantiation of each verb in this kind of discourse; (iii) extend in delicacy the system network proposed by Fawcett, based on the concept of “lexis as most delicate grammar” (Halliday, 1961), and (iv) consider the diversity of verbs that realize communication processes in the light of the discourse in which they are inserted