For the people: Defining communities of readership through an Appraisal comparison of letters to two South African newspapers

Smith, Jade; Adendorff, Ralph

doi:10.1016/j.dcm.2013.10.003

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…With regard to appraisal applied into media reception research, Coffin and O’Halloran’s (2005, 2006) appraisal analysis of newspaper corpora and dynamic reader positioning indicates the significance of the readers’ negotiation of emotional responses in future empirical studies. Based on a contrast study of letters to tabloid and mainstream newspapers, Smith and Adendorff (2014) reveal readers’ affiliation around a bond with valuation concerning the topic of education. Chatterje-Doody and Crilley (2019), adopting the concept of “affective investments”, explore online audiences’ emotional reactions to media images of war.…”

Section: Appraisalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Why attacking the Bureau of Industry and Commerce?”: news value flow to news comments on Chinese social media

Jian-xin

2021

Media, Culture & Society

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Comments on social media provide a suitable site to view text-reader relations from the perspective of news reading. This article interrogates readers’ evaluative responses to Weibo shared news in China. The study, drawing upon Discursive News Values Analysis and appraisal, first identifies the news values of Eliteness, Personalization, Negativity and Positivity in a news story about car quality sourced from the Weibo network of People’s Daily. Then the following 1027 comments, including Chinese characters and emojis, are investigated by using a mixed-methods approach. The corpus analysis shows that business Eliteness (the Mercedes dealership) and Personalization (the buyer) are convergently valued news actors, while readers evaluate authoritative Eliteness (the Bureau) in an unexpected way. Close examination of the appraisal devices in the comments uncovers a divergence between negative judgment toward Eliteness and positive affect/judgment for Personalization. Emojis play an important role in activating attitudes through the interplay with language. In commentary journalism, the readers’ response can influence news value decisions when there is a mismatch between the news values promoted by news organizations and the values that readers perceive as newsworthy.

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Section: Appraisalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Why attacking the Bureau of Industry and Commerce?”: news value flow to news comments on Chinese social media

Jian-xin

2021

Media, Culture & Society

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“…Appraisal System, which explores the -interpersonal metafunction‖ Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) of language, is an important development of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). It is a useful tool for discourse analysis of various genres, including official statements or reports (Huan, 2016a;Li and Xu, 2018;Smith and Adendorff, 2014;Swain, 2012;Vertommen et al, 2012) and comparatively more personal texts such as Trump's tweets (Ross and Caldwell, 2020), personal emails (Ho, 2014), online hotel reviews (Tian, 2013), academic thesis (Geng and Wharton, 2019) and doctors' discourse (Gallardo and Ferrari, 2010). The present study, endeavoring to analyze news discourse, will also adopt Appraisal System as the analytical framework.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Confrontation to Collaboration: Attitudinal Changes of Trish Regan on US-China Trade War in Commentaries and Debate

Weichao¹,

Zhang²

2020

ELLR

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In her cross-border debate with Chinese anchor Liu Xin, Trish Regan, an American anchor, behaved differently than what she had done in her previous commentaries. This paper explores the attitudinal differences evinced by Trish Regan on different occasions from a linguistic perspective. Based on the Appraisal System, especially the Attitude subsystem (Martin and White, 2005), this paper examines the attitudinal resources utilized by Trish Regan in her two news commentaries and her online debate with her counterpart Liu Xin—a set of texts which provides a longitudinal account of how Trish has changed her attitude. By annotating the attitude resources used by Trish, positive and negative evaluations are expected to be clarified, with detailed analyses of subsystems in the Attitude System to be given. The results suggest that Trish’s attitude towards China has changed a lot in her commentaries and the debate with Liu Xin—from negative to partly positive. It also appears that Trish maintained a positive attitude towards the United States while she changed her positive attitude towards the trade war into a negative one in her debate with Liu Xin.

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“…(08_PD) 2 The use of positive Judgment resources appropriately and correct demonstrates the reader's support of the position being put in the text: that China should take countermeasure action against the United States, while the negative Judgment protectionism and Attitude hurts show the reader's opposite position toward U.S. punitive tariff. At the same time, the reader is able to affiliate with other readers who share his or her value position and defend against those who may be on the side of the United States, thus form different imagined (Smith and Adendorff, 2014) or ambient (Zappavigna, 2011) online reading communities.…”

Section: Appraisal Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In more recent audience studies, Smith and Adendorff (2014) combine corpus linguistics and Appraisal to investigate how different reading communities bond around the value of education through letters from tabloid readers and mainstream newspaper readers in South Africa. Kyriakidou (2015) proposes a framework for categorizing audience engagement with media stories as four types of (emotional) ‘media witnessing’ and examines this in an empirical study of Greek audience’s responses to human distant suffering.…”

Section: Reading Positionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two-layer reading positions in comments on online news discourse about China

Jian-xin

2019

Discourse & Communication

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Reading experience is viewed as ‘interactive and negotiable’ for different reading positions are created in readers’ responses to the same news report. To understand the differences between ‘ preferred reading’ and actual readings, this article, drawing on the context models and the Appraisal framework, analyzes 785 readers’ comments attached to 23 hard news stories sourced from the China Daily mobile application (APP) and the People’s Daily Online website. The study combines corpus semantic tagging analysis for readers’ choices of evaluative lexis with a manual analysis of Appraisal resources for reading position construction based on a whole text perspective. The results show that readers are likely to use Appraisal resources strategically to defend their own opinions against other commenters or affiliate with large numbers of potential readers without commenting. Furthermore, comments were found to be directed either at the text or at other commenters, and through this a number of different reading positions were revealed. The readers’ context models are the cognitive link between discourse properties and social strategies in the process of news understanding.

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For the people: Defining communities of readership through an Appraisal comparison of letters to two South African newspapers

Cited by 7 publications

References 7 publications

“Why attacking the Bureau of Industry and Commerce?”: news value flow to news comments on Chinese social media

“Why attacking the Bureau of Industry and Commerce?”: news value flow to news comments on Chinese social media

From Confrontation to Collaboration: Attitudinal Changes of Trish Regan on US-China Trade War in Commentaries and Debate

Two-layer reading positions in comments on online news discourse about China

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