Legitima prisökningar?

This thesis is a critical discourse analysis of how money and the economic system are linguistically constructed and maintained in Swedish news journalism. The study focuses on news articles about prices and inflation published during the first quarter of 2025. The material consists partly of articles about inflation statistics, and partly of articles about the boycott of major grocery chains that took place during the period. The aim is to examine how language use contributes to shaping and reproducing the prevailing monetary system.
The material is analyzed through two text-oriented analyses. The first is based on systemic-functional grammar and examines the texts’ transitivity and ergativity. The second draws on the Swedish Academy Grammar and Hooper and Thompson’s theory of asserted propositions, and examines how propositions are presented as asserted, presupposed or actualized.
The results show that inflation and price increases are represented as independently acting phenomena, rather than as the result of human decisions or social structures. The analysis also shows how subordinate clauses can establish and reproduce economic knowledge as self-evident. In this way, the thesis demonstrates how grammatical structures can contribute to reproducing an image of the monetary system as natural, complex and difficult to influence.