Media Stance and Interpersonal Meaning in News Discourse: A Systemic Functional Analysis of BBC and China Daily’s Reports on China’s Hydropower Project

Abstract

This study explores how media stance is constructed through language choices in news discourse. Drawing on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, it investigates interpersonal meaning in BBC and China Daily reports on China’s approval of a major hydropower project in Xizang. The analysis focuses on four dimensions: mood, modality, pronoun use and appraisal to reveal how language realize evaluative positions and attitudes. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the BBC report relies heavily on medium-probability modal verbs, e.g., could, would and negatively loaded lexical choices, which highlight environmental and humanitarian concerns. In contrast, China Daily frequently employs high-certainty modality and positive evaluative language, framing the project as environmentally responsible and development-oriented. These language differences indicate distinct institutional identities and communicative purposes in the two media outlets. The findings contribute to understanding how news language encodes stance and ideology, demonstrating the potential of functional linguistic frameworks for media discourse analysis.