| Speech is shaped by syntactic rules. New Genre theory suggests it is also shaped by specific, recurrent social contexts. Being socially constructed, rules governing genres rhetorically reflect biases or world views of speakers who participate in them. Yet while speakers exercise choice in their utterances, world views too are socially shaped. Based on the premise that syntactic, rhetorical, and generic constraints are concomitant, this thesis develops a methodology combining Systemic Linguistics and the Pentad to show that, given two different utterances within the same genre, aspects of syntax are rhetorically significant in differentiating them. Similarities can be attributed to conventions of the genre, differences to world views of the speakers.; The "utterances" compared are transcripts of two televised accounts of the same story (the British Columbia government's land-use decision on old-growth forest in Clayoquot Sound) as reported by BCTV, privately owned affiliate of CTV, and CBC, publicly owned national broadcaster. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
