“WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?” AN SFL ANALYSIS ON THE WAVES OF THE WAR IN MARVEL’S CIVIL WAR

Abstract

Comic books are part of the mass culture in the people’s lives from different generations and until now, they remain relevant and present in our social, political, historical and cultural contexts. The objective of this study is to give direct attention to the verbal text in the synopsis and recap pages from Civil War, a seven issue event from Marvel Comics. To analyze the profile of Captain America, Iron Man and other relevant characters in the text the Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) offer theoretical tools to construe a metafunctional profile of the participants through the text’s lexical choices, especially by the textual and experiential metafunction. Through the Macrothemes (Martin & Rose, 2007) identified, it was possible to find elements that function as point of departure to the flow of information that guides the narrative through the synopsis and recap pages to the main question for the characters and the readers: Whose side are you on? Finally, focusing in Obligatory and Optional lexical patterns (Halliday, Hasan, 1985; Hasan 1996) highlights the Registration Act as an Obligatory main element in which orients the war in peaks of information through the Optional elements. Packing all the theoretical framework, giving direct attention to the lexical choices highlighted by the analysis, the investigation describes the functions of these patterns in the characters and main narrative, as a way to understand how the orientation describes Captain America and Iron Man and, through the investigation, the narrative takes a stand