ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores further into the details of linguistic structure. He shows that the structure of a news text, under the pressure of the social circumstances of communication, embodies values and beliefs; that representation of experience, of events and concepts, is patterned by the structure of the medium, so inevitably that the very notion of ‘representation’ carries within it the qualification of representation from a specific ideological point of view, that values, or ideology, differ systematically in different forms of expression, as for example in the characteristically different choices of words and grammatical phrasings found in the Press. Transitivity—part of the ideational function—is a fundamental and powerful semantic concept in Halliday, an essential tool in the analysis of representation, which has already proved extremely illuminating in critical linguistics. The author concludes with some cautionary comments on the practice of analysis.
