Analysis of representations about Brazil in two pieces of news in English-Language newspapers - BBC News and The NYTimes

Abstract

Given that Brazil has been hosting some international events, it has emerged on the agenda of the international media. Due to that, my intention is to investigate representations about Brazil in two English language newspapers of wide media in order to problematize the representations that are produced or put into circulation by the foreign media. The newspapers chosen were BBC News and The NY Times. The theoretical and methodological perspective is the Systemic Functional Grammar. The clauses are analyzed through the transitivity system proposed by Halliday and Matthiessen (2014), which focuses on the ideational metafunction, i.e., clauses as representation. Some contributions of Cultural Studies concerning the concept of representation are brought to the study. The results obtained show that while events are being exposed, representations of Brazil are produced and stereotypes are reaffirmed by the lexicogrammatical choices of such news.