The Grammatical Features of Vietnamese Journalistic Discourses about Women from Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis Theory

Abstract

Basing principally on Fairclough's theory of Critical Discourse Analysis (2001) and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (1994), Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis was initiated in “Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis - Gender, Power and Ideology in Discourse” by Lazar (2005) is developed into a discourse research approach that sheds interest on the relationship between gender power and language or language use. Following this research approach, this paper outlines a detailed study of the grammatical features of journalistic discourse written about women in Vietnamese Women Newspapers, issues of 2021, from the perspectives of Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, of which the grammatical features of journalistic discourse would be expressed in three aspects: experiential, interpersonal, and expressive values. More specifically, the experiential values of grammar were reflected in the transitivity processes, the interpersonal values were shown in modes of sentences, and finally, the expressive values were realized in the expressive modality. The study results revealed that the three most frequently used processes were material, relational and verbal. Besides, declarative sentence type was used most frequently, and there was very little likelihood of modal word use. These grammatical features were consistent with the news genre applied for newspapers while remaining ample contextual conditions for reflecting journalists' perceptions of women and feminism.