TRANSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT HEADLINES

Abstract

This study examines the way that Western and Eastern newspapers construct representations of the Israel-Palestine conflict based on linguistic choices in headlines, drawing on the transitivity of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). A corpus of 600 headlines from the period 2023-2024 of publication from six prominent newspapers (three Western: The New York Times, The Times, Frankfurter Rundschau and three Eastern: Tehran Times, Dawn and Arab News) was analyzed for patterns in the process types and participant roles. Quantitative results reveal that Western outlets employ material and verbal processes that by far prioritize Israeli political and military actors as rational doers who guide action while generalizing and backgrounding Palestinians. Eastern headlines, by contrast, employ more mental, relational and existential processes and humanize Palestinian civilians hopefully to the extent of emotion and experience, as well as emphasizing humanitarian crises and the basic structural conditions of occupation and blockade. Qualitative analysis also shows the role that grammatical constructions and lexical choices play in perceptions of legitimacy, aggression and victimhood. These differences serve to draw attention to the ideological function of headlines, which operate not as neutrals, functioning as a summary, but as a site of discourse by which competing realities of the conflict are constructed. The study adds to critical discourse analysis through showing the usefulness of transitivity in uncovering how the media produce power and ideology in crumpled media writing, which means a critical response to conflict reporting in language.