(Dis)empowering Ukraine/Russia through journalese: A Transitivity approach

     Ameni Hlioui

      Abstract

Besides the devastating human losses, the Russia Ukraine war “can impact society within […] and outside (e.g., supply shortage and inflation and threat of false information)” (Lim et al. 2022,  23). It can also affect “business within […] and outside (e.g., test of business ethics and moral obligations and test of brand management) war-torn countries” (Lim et al. 2022, 23). These impacts might lead countries, and by extension their news outlets to stand by a side of the war depending on what is at stake for them. In this context, this paper aims at analyzing news articles supporting Ukraine and news articles supporting Russia to see how the same war is represented differently via transitivity choices. These choices will be annotated in the data using the UAM CorpusTool for semi-automatic annotation of texts. The system of transitivity is chosen since it treats the clause as “a mode of reflection, of imposing linguistic order on our experience of the endless variation and flow of events” (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014, 213). It is advocated, thus, that the journalese choices of experiencing this war event might empower or disempower one nation over another depending on the ideology supported by the news outlet. For instance, the results have shown that the Pro Ukraine narratives attribute the quality of animals, war criminals and savages to Russians and heroes to Ukrainians using attributive relational clauses and the Pro Russian narratives use relational identifying clauses to label Ukraine as a US tool to endanger Russia’s defenses.