Aspects of Ideology in Letters to the Editor

This paper is an investigation of the influence of ideology on the construction of the discourses of letters to the editor of three magazines (Time, Manchete & Newsweek). Letters to the Editor is a site in the magazines where readers can voice their claims, supporting or denying facts, which occur in the social sphere. The corpus is analyzed according to Halliday's (1985) theory of transitivity for the repercussion of ideologies in the lexicogrammatical choices. The results indicate that in the process of expressing personal & subjective thought, writers also seem to encode, in their discourses, social inequalities, power & interests which support the social relations, & which seem to be shared by social groups as naturalized beliefs. 32 References. Adapted from the source document