Covert Evaluation And Dynamic Reader Positioning In Journalistic Discourse

In order to preserve the professional norm of "objectivity",news writers often employ the implicit evaluative strategies in the news text,which position the readers in a subtle and dynamic way.This is the so-called "dog-whistle" politics.The starting point for this dissertation is the view that,contrary to any claims to 'objectivity' on the part of the media industry,news reporting is a mode of rhetoric in the broadest sense of the word.It is a value-laden,ideologically determined discourse with a clear potential to influence the media audience's assumptions and beliefs about the way the world is and the way it ought to be.A key aspect of this rhetorical and ultimately ideological functionality is evaluation.According to Liu(2007),there are two levels of meaning functioning in discourse:descriptive and evaluative,and evaluation is an important feature of language.A literature review of evaluation reveals that some related notions to evaluation have been conducted from different perspectives such as narratological approach,philosophical approach,pragmatic approach,grammatical approach, systemic-functional approach etc.But these approaches are rather static and none of them is institution-specific and context sensitive.The purpose of the thesis is to provide a descriptive framework of evaluation in hard news reports and sets about the applications of the framework to discourse analysis in order to develop new insights into the nature of the contemporary,English-language 'broadsheets'.The framework is based on Appraisal Theory and puts the textual context into the foreground.It focuses on the interplaying of the evaluative devices with the local lexico-grammatical context,the attributing context and the global textual context.The analysis is taken from the logogenetic and the dynamic perspective,with the focus on the cumulative build-up of the evaluative meanings which creates a global evaluative groove.The considerations of the textual context and the conditioning environments of the evaluation are significant in illuminating the dynamic reader positioning.The 'trope' of objectivity of news reports requires the journalistic author's implicit point of view.Implicit evaluative devices employed by the writer are usually text dependent,the analysis of which requires a dynamic perspective from the analysts.The analytical framework proposed by the thesis conducts the analysis from the micro-to-macro level.At the micro-analytical level,the analysis focuses on the evaluative mechanisms in local lexico-grammatical context and attributing context which realize the prosodic evaluative meanings.Evaluation can be conducted on three dimensions:the category of attitude,the mode of evaluation and the loading of evaluation.The category of attitude includes affect,judgement and appreciation;the mode of evaluation is a distinction between inscribed values and evoked values or attitudinal inscriptions and attitudinal tokens;the loading of evaluation is construed by the positive or negative evaluative values including happy or unhappy,satisfied or unsatisfied,etc.In journalistic discourse,a significant part of the evaluative loading is carried out by indirect mechanisms(including evocations and provocations)in local lexico-grammatical context which serve to guide,prime and condition readers to respond to the depicted events in positive or negative terms.They include evocation via informational content,provocation via analogy or metaphor,provocation via counter-expectancy,intensification,provocation via reference and predication, provocation via epistemic modalization,attitudinal associations,and affectedness and agency,etc.In the analysis,the local textual environment of the implicit evaluative strategies is put into foreground and the interplaying of attitudinal markers in local context is explored.The local attributing context constitutes the other part of the micro-level analytical framework.Two dimensions are distinguished in analysis of the voicing values as evaluative strategies by the news reporter:the loading of evaluation and the mode of evaluation.On the dimension of the loading of evaluation,positive or negative evaluations are reflected in terms of the alignment or disalignment of the news reporter to the reported value position.On the dimension of the mode of evaluation,it is indicated that a clear relationship exists between types of evaluative utterances,kinds of quotations,and their evaluative function in media discourse. Sinclair(1986)distinguishes averral and attribution and points out the evaluative nature of attribution.Attribution consists of three parts:the source of voice,the attributing expressions and the attributed proposition.They often combine together and interact with one another to perform the implicit evaluative functions of authorial endorsement,authorial distancing and evidential standing.On the dimension of the mode of evaluation,attribution can be divided into Direct Evaluative Utterances (DEU)and Reported Evaluative Utterances(REU)according to the different attributing contexts.The Reported Evaluative Utterances can also be divided into different sub-types according to different evaluative sources and targets.This division and classification reflects the shifting of the responsibility of evaluation and displays a dynamic reader positioning.The dynamic perspective requires a logogenetic and more global view of the operation of evaluative mechanisms,which constitutes the macro-analytical-level.At this level,attending to the global context,the thesis explores the meta-relations of phases and stages which are set up within the local context(both lexico-grammatical and attributing)by which the instantial text's axiology or the evaluative groove is construed and the reader is positioned dynamically by a relational reading.The framework is based on the Appraisal Theory which is developed broadly within the theoretical framework of SFL and draws inspirations from the study of intertextuality,Macken-Horirak's(2003)model of contextual Appraisal,White's (2006)framework of evaluative semantics in media discourse and Wortham and Locher's(1996)"ventriloquating techniques".The texts are types which frequently occur in the news coverage(as opposed to the commentaries,columns and editorial) of the so-called 'broadsheet' or 'highbrow' media.The tiles are the Times,the Guardian,the Daily Telegraph and CBS,CNN online news.The main contributions of the dissertation are firstly to set up a descriptive framework which provides fuller and more theoretically principled accounts of the evaluative aspect of news reporting.It adjusts our view towards the so-called 'objective' hard news or the discourse of reporter-voice.The framework also implies the perspectival shifts in reading appraisal: coding of an item is itself a fragile process and it needs a more dynamic or synoptic perspective.It reveals the dynamic reader positioning which is neglected in the area of CDA.