Band 4, Heft 2

ABSTRACT The “trial by media” phenomenon that describes the media frenzy accompanying a high-profile court case, and that may be at odds with a defendant’s right to a fair trial by an impartial jury, has been widely researched. The aim of this project is consequently to investigate whether jurors could be influenced by their readings of the media in trials receiving less media attention. Using the systemic functional linguistics framework, this study uses a murder trial held in Sydney, Australia, and contrasts the crime story, as described in the court’s Decision, with an article published in the Daily Telegraph at the time of the offender’s arrest. The aim is to explore whether the jurors who were appointed to this trial could have been affected by their reading of the article. The findings highlight the ways in which the news report is made persuasive through a range of features, such as its ideational structure, rhetorical organisation, use of circumstantial details, transitivity and agency patterns, as well as the ways in which the journalists seek to involve their readership through their use of attitudinal meanings and engagement, as well as their differentiated use of the crime participants’ names.

ABSTRACT Building on a 1976 model of cohesive devices, this article probes the literature on these linguistic tools with the aim of generating a comprehensive model of cohesion that can be used as an instrument for textual analysis across different text types. This article addresses two main questions: (1) what are the linguistic tools that can be incorporated into the 1976-model of cohesive devices in the creation of an operational model? and (2) what would such a comprehensive model of cohesive devices look like? The contributions of various scholars are examined to determine which elements might be considered as cohesive devices, apart from those introduced in the 1976 model. For almost all the categories within the lexico-grammar taxonomy presented in 1976, more elements are found that can play various cohesive roles in texts and that can be integrated into the 1976 model to form a more all-embracing one. To further illustrate this claim, examples from English and Arabic are used to present a new model of analysis applicable to various languages.

ABSTRACT This paper compares the semantics of grammatical choices in Chinese with the system of modality in English, with particular reference to descriptions from systemic functional linguistics. The latter is a theory much informed by both English and Chinese in its development. Based on existing literature on language typology, this paper seeks not only an examination of the usefulness of this grammatical potential to translation scholars but also to provide more delicate typological descriptions to ensure commensurability in translation. As modality is often expected to be a key site for expressing interpersonal judgements, this paper investigates whether choices in this system can be indicative of patterns of ideologically motivated regularities, or shifts, in the translated texts. This paper uses the Chinese translations of Wild Swans and Mao’s Last Dancer as domains of study, both of which are highly successful but politically controversial autobiographies written in English by Chinese migrant writers. Incorporating both quantitative and qualitative approaches, this study has found how meaningful choices of modality have altered the evaluation of political leaders.