Transitivity in Brazilian Greenpeace's electronic bulletins

Abstract

This article aims to analyse transitivity choices in 21 Greenpeace electronic bulletins written in Brazilian Portuguese. The theoretical framework is based on Systemic-Functional Grammar (HALLIDAY, 1994; HALLIDAY & MATTHIESSEN, 1999, 2004). Corpus Linguistics was the main methodological tool, in which concordancers and a tag system were applied. As results indicated, these texts draw a textual representation in which each of the text entities plays a specific role. People affiliated with Greenpeace, for example, are commonly portrayed as advocates of green causes, while companies are commonly represented as villains who care nothing about the environment. Each of these representations is accompanied by specific grammatical patterns.

Keywords

• transitivity
• systemic functional grammar
• green discourse
• corpus linguistics
• Greenpeace