Transitivity Analysis of Air-boming Attacks on Gaza Newspaper Headlines

Abstract

This study is intended to analyse  newspaper headlines tackling the Israeli attacks on Gaza in Palestine. For this purpose, the study adopts Haliday's transitivity system, introduced within his seminal work Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) in an attempt to investigate the way the under-investigation incidents are portrayed  via news headlines.

The main question pursued in this work is how newspapers editors and news writers construct an image of a certain event through the various selections from the linguistic repertoire, specifically, the Israili-Palestinian conflict. To find an answer to this question the study adopted the framework of transitivity analysis within a descriptive approach to identify ideational meanings realized by grammatical selections. The to- be-analysed data related to the above mentioned events are selected from the news headlines published in the Independent and the New York Times during the period of attacks starting from 13-17 May, 2021. Ten newspaper headlines are selected from each newspaper. The selected headlines were examined then segmented into clauses to make it possible to identify the type of processes, participants, and circumstances involved. Finally, conclusions were set forward based on the mentioned analysis. The genre of newspaper headlines were chosen as it is narrative-based genre and applicable to the notion of transitivity. The analysis revealed that material and relational processes were dominant denoting that the process is mainly focusing on actions and events. The results, reached within this work, revealed that the linguistic selections made to construct the headlined depicting the events in concern were made in a way that gives a negative impression to the reader and depicts a negative image of the Israeli forces. The selected linguistic features reflect the writers perspective towards the events under investigation and this may influence the readers perspective.