The effect of functional role on language choice in newspapers.

Language is a tool: its function is to enable us to communicate with each-other. Yet traditional grammars ignore this functional aspect of language, providing instead a purely formal description of language elements. The system of functional grammar developed by the linguist MAK Halliday and others attempts to describe language in a different way, by relating language elements to the function a particular segment of language performs and to the context in which the language is produced. Such a system predicts that the structural and linguistic choices made during language choice reflect and are influenced by the context in which language is used and the functional tasks it seeks to fulfil. In this thesis I attempt to apply elements of the functional grammar developed by Halliday and other linguists working within the functional tradition to a comparative quantitative/ qualitative analysis of newspaper texts to show how the language choices made in newspapers are affected by the functional role those newspapers play in