Fundamental evaluative adjective patterns in british broadsheet and tabloid newspaper discourse (original) (raw)
Related papers
Evaluation in Media Discourse Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus
Evaluation or the linguistic expression of speaker/writer opinion has only recently become the focus of linguistic analysis (Hunston, 2004; Hunston & Thompson, 2000; Martin & White, 2005). Evaluation in Media Discourse Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus is a welcome addition to investigating evaluative manifestations in newspaper language, a type of discourse we are inundated with on a daily basis. The book will be instructive as well as interesting to academics and researchers in corpus linguistics and journalism. Aiming at providing an account of evaluation and how it is deployed in the register of newspaper reporting, the methodology 0 0 1 F integrates corpus based research with manual text analysis. The book is well-organized and each chapter has a lead-in at the beginning and is usually summarized at the end, which can make readers move on smoothly with main ideas always in mind. Besides the reprint permissions, acknowledgements and abbreviations, and typographical conventions in the beginning and appendices, references and index at the end, the book is mainly divided into 3 parts with 8 chapters in total. Part one which occupies the first 4 chapters discusses evaluation in the context of newspaper discourse and proposes a new theory of evaluation, a parameter-based framework. Part two (chapters 5 and 6) offers a corpus-based analysis of the news based on a hundred newspaper articles (70,000 words) from both British tabloid and broadsheet newspapers. Part three (chapters 7 and 8) discusses the empirical and theoretical issues, the differences and similarities between broadsheets and tabloids as well as the implications for a new theory of evaluation. Chapter 1 answers questions such as what, why and how to study evaluation, and comments on the seventy thousand word corpus of newspaper discourse that was used for the analysis. In this introductory chapter, Bednarek conducts a survey of the phenomenon of speaker opinion variously known as evaluation, appraisal or stance, argues that it is a significant and essential part of our lives to interpret the world, and justifies using a small-scale corpus to analyze the object of her investigation. The author acknowledges that the construct of evaluation under its different names has been investigated widely and methodically though most of the research in media studies is either non-linguistic or of a limited scope. Moreover, little or no research applied a parameter-based approach of evaluation. Chapter 2 examines the socioeconomic and linguistic context of the news story as a backdrop to the further empirical study in part two. The discussion of previous research emphasizes the fact that it tends to focus more on the nature of mass media and newspaper bias, rather than systematic linguistic analysis of media evaluative language. The sources of the data for the study of British print media are mentioned, specifically ten British national newspapers comprising five broadsheets (The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Daily Telegraph) and five tabloids (The Sun, The Star, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Express). Chapters 3 and 4 offer more detailed discussion about the actual notion of evaluation and its different approaches. In chapter 3, two similar notions are introduced, namely, stance and appraisal. Stance is defined as " the open expression of the speaker's attitudes, feelings, judgments, including the indication of the speaker's degree of commitment towards the truthfulness of the message " (25). As for appraisal, it involves " resources for moralizing, amplifying, reacting emotionally, judging morally and evaluating aesthetically " (27). Afterwards, in chapter 4, an attempt is made to establish a new framework called the 0 0 1 F parameter-based framework of evaluation. The author postulates that there are dif ferent parameters along which speakers can evaluate whatever they see and hear. These parameters are divided into Core evaluative parameters and Peripheral evaluative parameters. While Core evaluative parameters relate to evaluative qualities ascribed to the entities, situations or propositions that are evaluated, and involve evaluative scales,
In: Evaluation in Context. Eds. Geoff Thompson & Laura Alba-Juez. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2014
This paper investigates the expression of evaluation in a corpus collected from weekly news magazines in English in an attempt to address two main research questions. These concern, first, the linguistic patterns that are regularly associated with the expression of evaluation in this written register and, second, the place of evaluative expressions in this discourse type and the subsequent implications for the organisation of the text.
Emotion and opinion in online tabloids and broadsheets
Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis
This paper is a corpus-based study focusing on implicit evaluation expressed in newspaper discourse, namely, the semantic mapping of emotion and opinion. The corpus, compiled of online “front page” newspaper articles from both selected tabloids (The Sun, The Express, The Mirror) and broadsheets (The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent) was used to answer three research questions: 1) Is evaluation markedly expressed in newspaper discourse? 2) What linguistic means are typical for construing evaluation in newspaper discourse? 3) Is there a difference between the tabloids and the broadsheets regarding the way in which/how evaluation is conveyed/employed? To answer these questions, a pilot keyword study on only six articles was carried out (one article from each of the aforementioned newspapers). The findings confirmed the importance of adjectives in expressing evaluation. Following this, a large study was conducted to detect local grammar adjectival lexicogrammatical patterns, int...
Evaluative language in Romanian and US regional newspapers – A comparative approach
Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brașov, Series IV: Philology. Cultural Studies, 2020
The paper analyses the way in which evaluative language in used in two regional newspapers – a US and a Romanian one. It starts from two articles that cover a similar topic, namely the mining disasters that took place in the two areas, and studies the way in which the disaster and the people responsible for it are presented. The analytical framework for the analysis is based on Martin and White’s definition of appraisal in terms of attitude, engagement and graduation and the analysis focuses on the similarities and differences between the two articles in terms of evaluation and its linguistic realizations.
Linguistic Manifestations of Modality in Newspaper Editorials
Modality as a property of language use is generally exploited by language users. Its role in newspaper editorial is of special importance in that editorial writers tend to make use of this property to establish either a favorable or unfavorable bias throughout the text to manipulate their readers' opinion. Through textual analysis of the selected editorials culled from the American newspaper, The New York Times, and the Persian English newspaper, Tehran Times, the present study firstly aimed at identifying the linguistic manifestation of modality employed in the two newspapers followed by presenting the classroom implications of the findings. Revealing some genre-specific features of this media discourse, the comparison of the two papers in terms of employing auxiliary modal verbs suggested that both of the papers preferred mainly predictive auxiliary modals such as will or would to the other kinds of modals. However, the higher number of the predictive modals in NYT suggested the idea that identifying what would happen in the future was the main concern of the editorial writers in NYT. On the other hand, comparing the modals of necessity in the two papers suggested that editorial writers in Tehran Times were occupied with what should be done.
A LEXICO-SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF SELECTED NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS
2019
ABSTRACT This work carried out a lexico-syntactic analysis of newspaper editorials. The study, specifically, identified the lexico-syntactic features used by the editors in the selected editorials; examined how language was used by the editors in treating the themes of their editorial discourses; and analysed the sentence types in their editorials coupled with their communicative effects on the intended audience. The data for the study were ten (10) editorials from five (5) online newspapers. The data were analysed using Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. Findings from the analysis of the editorials revealed that the editors projected themes on the strengths and weaknesses of the governorship election. The study, therefore, concluded that the editors used simple language to aid readers’ comprehension of the editorials.
CrossRoads, 2022
Using corpus linguistic techniques, this exploratory study is intended to provide a descriptive insight into frequent lexical bundles, keywords and key terms as well as selected lexical markers of style used in a corpus of professional film reviews. The research material includes 210 domain-specific texts from the years 2020-2021, extracted from the websites of six British newspapers, magazines and institutions offering guides for moviegoers. The results show that the analyzed reviews make frequent use of general cinematic terms and more specific lexis denoting the different types and (sub)genres of cinematic productions represented by the reviewed films. Other salient lexical features include a high concentration of referential but low concentration of stance bundles, though attitudinal items, particularly evaluation adjectives, significantly enrich the lexical inventory of the reviews. The presented data may have important pedagogic applications in the area of teaching authentic English to future film reviewers and film journalists.