Abstract

ABSTRACT
How the news expresses exclusion: A linguistic analysis of two Montreal newspapers and their coverage of the Occupy movement
James Gibbons
This study examines exclusion as an expressive act occurring in language. Using a sample of news coverage taken from The Gazette and La Presse, this thesis examines grammatical and lexical elements that express exclusion. The purpose is to examine the characteristics of language that posit a “they” identification, as opposed to an “us” identification. Elements that express a “not like us” differentiation will be considered along with supplementary context, such as social theories of exclusion. The methodology adopted for this study is based on critical linguistic studies and functional grammar; this method considers language to express ideology, whether deliberate or inadvertent. The methodology examines power structures in the sentence such as “transitivity,” which is the analysis of who does what to whom, and lexical (word and terminological) choices that, in certain instances, express negative associative values (connotations). These transitive and lexical considerations, taken cumulatively across a text, provide a conception of the principal idea used to organize the text, or what some of the prevailing ideas happen to be. The sample used consists of news coverage of the Occupy movement, as featured during the time frame spanning the 15th of October to the 25th of November 2011.