On emotions and the journalistic ideals of factuality and objectivity - Tools for analysis

Reporting on emotions inherently challenges the journalistic ideals of objectivity and factuality. This paper presents two complementary approaches that can be used to reveal what is 'hidden' under news texts. One of them draws on central concepts of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammer, while the other is based on the Apprasial framework. My data come from the wire reports of two global news agencies, AP and Reuters. Three central grammatical systems of Halliday's Functional Grammer - transitivity, nominalization and grammatical metaphor - are especially well suited for examining issues of responsibility. Nominalization transforms processes (verbs) or properties (adjectives) into nouns after metaphorical rewording. Nominalized emotions can then function as a participant in processes, according to various options of transitivity, or as a part of a prepositional pharse. When participant roles of the original (mental) process of feeling remain hidden, the language often becomes vague and obscure.