Appraisal Resources and National Image: A Case Study on Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokespersons’ Responses About COVID-19 (original) (raw)
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GEMA Online® Journal of Language Studies, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic that is sweeping across the globe has caused increased anxiety. Studies in linguistics have found a variety of language expressions that convey people's anxiety and fear. However, there are only a few researchers that studied the use of language used in communication by the government, to enhance the citizens' morale and help them recover from psychological distress from the Covid-19 pandemic. This study focused on investigating the discursive strategies used by the Indonesian government spokesperson at daily press conferences during the Covid-19 pandemic. This study employed the Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA) framework. A total of 28 recorded press conference sessions that lasted between 25-45 minutes were analyzed through the identification, interpretation, and explanation stages. Identification was carried out through careful reading of the transcription of the government spokesperson's speech to find out the discursive strategy used by the spokesperson. The interpretation was done by grouping similar quotes with the same themes, based on the context of the discourse. The explanation was done by explaining, in a macro way, the situational aspects and social contexts that provide the background for the texts' production and relating them to the pandemic. The results of the study showed that the spokesperson made use of nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization and intensification, and mitigation strategies to deliver information to the public. The entire discursive strategies are used to improve the public's optimism and build solidarity of the citizens as a moral force to face the pandemic. Suggestions for future research about analysis of pandemic discourse employed by the government include corpus analysis, power representation and framing.
The paper analyses subjective evaluations of actors and processes surrounding the coronavirus pandemic in Nigeria in the context of political discourse. It examines President Muhammadu Buhari's subjective presence in texts as he adopts stances towards the pandemic and the Nigerian people with whom he communicates. Three speeches downloaded from the president's official Facebook page were purposively sampled and analysed using Martin & White's (2015) Appraisal Theory. The speeches were found to be characterised by seven evaluation resources, namely, affect expression of solidarity, affect expression of concern over effects of pandemic, affect expression of gratitude, judgement evaluation of the efforts at curbing COVID-19, appreciation evaluation of facilities available to curtail COVID-19, appreciation evaluation of processes designed to mitigate the effects of COVID-19, and appreciation evaluation of collaborative response to COVID-19. The preponderance of judgement value of the data implies that the president did more of assessing behaviours of actors involved in the process of managing, curbing or mitigating the effects of the pandemic than assessing the processes themselves. In conclusion, the paper argues that the primary goal of political speeches, especially in the context of a crisis situation, is to assert the relevance of political actors and express positive perception of power brokers.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2021
Critical discourse analysis aims to explore the dialectical relationship between discourse and ideology. Based on psycholinguistic research, this paper analyzes the Chinese and American media's news reports and comments on the COVID-19. It aims to expose the hidden psychological messages and ideologies behind the words. The corpus in this paper is mainly from the official media of China Daily and Time from December 2019 to January 2021 in China and the United States. This paper uses Wang Zhenhua's Appraisal Theory and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as tools to make a comparative analysis of the corpus. At the textual level, languages are classified and lexical choices are analyzed followed by the analysis of the reporter's ideology after reviewing the motivation of the reporters of two countries. On the level of social responsibility expression and discourse, the paper analyzes the news reports, which are characterized by the combination of the reporter's views on the news. In the aspect of social practice, the social and cultural factors and background of news reports are analyzed. China calls for strengthening cooperation and exchanges with other countries to jointly fight the epidemic. The Chinese government has actively shared its experience and made corresponding contributions to international economic recovery. However, the US government shirks its responsibility by claiming that the effective implementation of Chinese methods and experience in China does not mean that it can achieve corresponding results in Europe and the US. At the same time, the United States provides medical supplies to other countries. This study hopes to help awaken readers' critical thinking and increase their awareness of the anti-control of mass discourse. At the same time, it is hoped that readers can view the epidemic from a more scientific perspective, understand the facts and reject the unwarranted panic. It will also help reshape Chinese and American discourse.
JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC STUDIES, 2021
The outbreak of novel corona virus known as covid-19 stimulates discussions across the mainstream and new media with underlying purpose to educate people to take precautionary measures against the pandemic. As scholars see ideology as an ingredient for all discourse, the present paper deploys the appraisal framework to evaluate the attitudinal positions in forming ideology through which the language users aligned themselves in what they are conveyed about the covid-19 to their audience to either favour or disfavour particular viewpoints. The study which generates ten texts on the covid-19 from mainstream media and equal number of texts from new media in Nigeria and Iraq reveals in its findings that ‗interpersonal' mode of meaning-making dominates the covid-19 discourse when compared to the domains of attitudinal and dialogistic meaning-making using appraisal framework. The ideologically evaluation of the data shows that linguistic expressions on the Covid-19 regardless of the geographical location of the language users encourage solidarity on common issues or challenges about the pandemic by persuading people to take common action against these issues or challenges.
Anti-Chinese sentiment in the Czech public service media during the COVID-19 pandemic
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2021
This paper focuses on Sinophobia which is usually not expressed openly in the public service media. The Sinophobia discourse intensified in 2020 in connection with the coverage of the pandemic. How are anti-Chinese attitudes expressed in the news discourse of the Czech Radio and Czech Television? Examples from a broader analysis of the representation of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic in news and journalism programmes are given. Inductive qualitative research methods (discourse and semiotic analysis) were used to detect subtle nuances of meaning and reveal implicit presuppositions. This study focuses on the manifestations of bias, e.g., the ideologically grounded attitudes of the speakers. The anti-Chinese statements (about poor hygiene habits and eating wild animals) were most often mentioned in connection with the origin of the coronavirus, vaccination, and China expansive policy. Sinophobic messages were built on the opposition of Us and Them, which is, according to van Dijk (2000), the ...
POLITICAL DISCOURSE: OBAMA’S APPRAISAL ATTITUDE
This study aims at describing the way Obama gives appraisal attitude in his political view in front of his people of the United State in particular and people of the world in general. The object of the study was Obama's Inauguration Speech 2009 as the 44th president of the United State in the level of words, phrases, clauses and sentences. The data was analyzed using Appraisal Attitude System (AAS). The result of the study shows that Obama believes that America is in an intricate position since it has many problems and some countries do not trust America from the political perspective. Obama convinces his people by persuading them that he can solve the problems in good ways.
Framing Issues in the Specialised Discourse of Diplomacy. A Quantitative and Qualitative Approach
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This study explores the specialized ‘territory’ of diplomacy and, more particularly, it reports results on the cognitive frames used by British foreign ministers to pursue their ideological design. This work adopts both a cognitive and discourse-based perspective on the language of diplomacy assuming that the frames chosen allow speakers to negotiate solidarity with their audience and in so doing they ‘naturalize’ a number of ideological positions. More particularly, I will focus on those cognitive frames which prove to be statistically ‘salient’. Thus, quantitative methods developed in corpus linguistics will be used to support qualitative methods of critical reading of larger bodies of diplomatic-relevant texts.
INSTITUTIONAL COMMUNICATION CONCERNING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC A Critical Discourse Analysis of WHO Director- General’s Speeches, 2022
During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, institutional communication has been playing a crucial role. For instance, WHO (World Health Organization) has been involved in criticism concerning information related to the origins of the pandemic delivered or not in due time. 1 Starting from this assumption, the study is aimed at investigating the WHO Director-General communication concerning news related to the pandemic through the analysis of speeches delivered by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director-General, from 22nd January to 29th May 2020. From a methodological perspective, the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis will be adopted with particular emphasis on semantic / syntactic relations. Furthermore, the representation of social actors will be explored in order to better understand the roles played by both WHO and China in the news concerning the pandemic. In short, this work will try to explore the processes involved in the communication concerning the pandemic and the representations of the roles played by both WHO and China in order to understand legitimation strategies enacted by these two social actors.
International Journal of Research in Education
This paper explores the result of an appraisal analysis found in the editorial board of the Jakarta Post newspaper entitled “What the Pandemic Teaches Us”. The appraisal analysis focused on attitude, graduation, and engagement aspect. The findings show that the three kinds of attitudes, i.e affect, judgement and appreciation are applied in the texts, but mostly are judgement and appreciation. The types of the items are in the form of a word, nominal group, and clause. Meanwhile, the engagement mostly is mostly heterogloss. Most of the graduation is force and the scaling of graduation is up-scaled
Attitude Realization in News Reports: An Interpretation Through an Appraisal Analysis
Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2021
For the maintenance of the authorial voice, newspapers use rhetorical markers as an external supporting voice to win their readership. The current five-year studies show that news writers maintain engagement with their readers by their stances towards their point of views. This study aimed to find the attitudinal stances of two Pakistani Online newspapers i.e. ‘Dawn’ (alternative newspaper) and ‘The News’ (mainstream newspaper). The newspaper’s inclination was identified through its language. To discover the newspapers’ stances, Martin and White (2005) ‘Appraisal Analysis’ framework was employed on ‘2’ news reports comprising of ‘5013’ words on Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Speech at 74 United Nations’ session along with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by Norman Fairclough (1995). It was found that both newspapers indirectly invoked attitudes by laying evaluative ground which was explicitly explained in the quoted text. The prime minister of Pakistan Imran Khan was found the ‘Apprai...