Transitivity, Mood, Theme / Rheme and Lexical Density / Grammatical Metaphors in Newsweek Magazine Articles

The main reason for Michael A. K. Halliday, the “father” of systemic functional linguistics – and this report is based on functional linguistic analyses – to develop a new kind of grammar was that he saw the need to have a linguistic system that is more sociological in orientation. While Noam Chomsky, the most prominent of the so-called formal linguists, saw linguistics only as a means to describe the limits of language, Halliday and his fellow functional linguists are concerned with relating language to society, they try to figure out how the ways in which language is used have shaped its structure.

My goal in this analysis was to relate language to society in a practical example, I have tried to explore the differences between two journalistic articles of the same magazine, but taken out of different departments as far as the content is concerned. My question was, “Are there substantial differences in language between these articles?”