“What about Now, José?: Headlines, leads, and the Grammar of Social (In)Vizibilization

Abstract This paper presents a Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) of headlines and leads in six online hard news about a traffic accident involving two Brazilian citizens that summarize two socioeconomic classes: the dominant class (ACTOR 1) and the working class (ACTOR 2). Using the transitivity system of the Systemic Functional Grammar (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2004) and the taxonomy for representation of social events (FAIRCLOUGH, 2003), we aim to analyze how the media recontextualize the social event and its actors in order to create particular representations of them. The analysis reveals a set of grammatical and discursive mechanisms that produce the invisibilization of ACTOR 2 as a fatal victim of the accident, while mitigating the ACTOR 1’s responsability for provoking the event.