MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY HUỲNH THANH HOÀNG OANH AN APPRAISAL STUDY OF ATTITUDINAL RESOURCES IN ONLINE NEWSPAPER COMMENTARIES ON THE WORLD CUP 2022 Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201 Supervisor: Assoc. NGUYỄN THỊ THU HIỀN BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN HUỲNH THANH HOÀNG OANH NGHIÊN CỨU NGHĨA THÁI ĐỘ TRONG BÌNH LUẬN TRÊN BÁO TRỰC TUYẾN VỀ WORLD CUP 2022 Chuyên ngành : Ngôn ngữ Anh Mã số : 8220201 Người hướng dẫn: PGS. NGUYỄN THỊ THU HIỀN i STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I certify that this thesis An Appraisal Study of Attitudinal Resources in Online Newspaper Commentaries on the World Cup 2022 contains no material extracted or published elsewhere except where reference is made in the study. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree and is not currently being submitted for any other degree or award.
Binh Dinh, 2023 Huynh Thanh Hoang Oanh ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to many individuals who have heartened me in various ways to achieve my accomplishment today. I would like to express my deep and sincere gratitude to my research supervisor, Assoc. Nguyen Thi Thu Hien for giving me the opportunity to do research and providing invaluable guidance throughout this thesis. Without her timely enlightenment, my M.
journey could have been interrupted. Her dynamism, vision, dedication and motivation have deeply inspired me. She has taught me the methodology to carry out the research and present the research as clearly as possible. It is really a great privilege and honor to work and study under her guidance.
Additionally, I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to all of my lecturers who play a significant role in nurturing my interest in linguistic research. They have provided me with interesting and useful lectures and created favorable conditions for me to enhance my skills and widen my horizon of the knowledge of Linguistics for the past two years. Next, my sincere thanks go to all of my classmates, M.A students of English course 24th at Quy Nhon University, who supported me during the time we took the course together. Last but absolutely not least, from the bottom of my heart, I owe my debt to my family for their unconditional love and tremendous encouragement.
Without their supports, I could not have overcome all the challenges and obstacles on my academic pathway. iii ABSTRACT The thesis applied Appraisal Theory to analyze Attitudinal resources in English online newspaper commentaries on the World Cup 2022. The study aims at realizing the Attitudinal resources namely Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation and identifying the frequency of occurrence of subtypes used in online newspaper commentaries. The data is composed of 20 commentaries in English and collected from reliable online websites.
The research findings indicated that Appreciation and Judgement resources are strongly favored by EONCs writers. The authors tend to focus on evaluating the different events and people’s behaviours during the World Cup 2022 rather than express the emotions or feelings. EONCs writers are inclined to apply more Positive Affect, Positive Judgement, Positive Appreciation than Negative ones to convey their own emotions about the feelings of football, highlight the qualities and talents of the players, and express love for football. Explicit Judgement and Explicit Appreciation are superior to Implicit ones to help the language of evaluation clearer and make phenomena/objects become more animate.
The research outcomes are expected to be of valuable reference for learners of English in writing commentaries. iv ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS ABBREVIATIONS Aff : Affect App : Appreciation Auth : Authorial Cap : Judgement: Capacity Comp : Appreciation: Composition EONCs : English Online Newspaper Commentaries Exp : Explicit Hap : Affect: Un/Happiness Imp : Implicit Inc : Affect: Dis/Inclination Judg : Judgement Non-Auth : Non-Authorial Nor : Judgement: Normality Prop : Judgement: Propriety Reac : Appreciation: Reaction Sat : Affect: Dis/Satisfaction Sec : Affect: In/Security Ten : Judgement: Tenacity Val : Appreciation: Valuation Ver : Judgement: Veracity (-) : Negative (+) : Positive v CONVENTIONS Italics are used for quotes, technical terms, emphasis, and examples Bold is deployed to mark the first use of technical terms In the numbered examples: Bold marks the use of what is being demonstrated. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP. iii ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS. vi LIST OF TABLES. ix LIST OF FIGURES. Aim and objectives.
Aim of the study. Objectives of the study. Scope of the study. Significance of the study.
Organization of the study. 4 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. An overview of Appraisal Theory. Application of Appraisal Theory in discourse analysis.
20 CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY. Reliability and validity in the research. 27 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. The overall usage of the Attitude resources in EONCs.
Affect resources in EONCs. Sub-types of Affect resources in EONCs. Positive and Negative Affect resources in EONCs. Authorial and Non-Authorial Affect resources in EONCs.
Judgement resources in EONCs. Social Esteem and Social Sanction. Positive and Negative Judgment resources in EONCs. Explicit and Implicit Judgment resources in EONCs.
Appreciation resources in EONCs. Sub-types of Appreciation resources in EONCs. Positive and Negative Appreciation resources in EONCs. Explicit and Implicit Appreciation resources in EONCs.
53 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS. Summary of the findings. Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further research.
61 ix LIST OF TABLES Table 2. The Monogloss and the Heterogloss. Grammatical realizations of Affect. The system of Judgement.
Categories of Appreciation. Attitude sub-types in EONCs. Authorial and Non-Authorial Affect resources in EONCs. Sub-types of Judgement resources in EONCs.
Explicit and Implicit Judgement resources in EONCs. Explicit and Implicit Appreciation resources in EONCs. 53 x LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2. An overview of Appraisal resources.
Sub-systems of Attitude. Sub-types of Affect resources in EONCs. Frequency occurrence of parts of speeches in Affect resources in EONCs …………………………………………………………………………. Positive and Negative Affect resources in EONCs.
Social Esteem and Social Sanction in EONCs. Positive and Negative Judgement resources in EONCs. Sub-types of Appreciation resources in EONCs. Positive and Negative Appreciation resources in EONCs.
51 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The researcher begins this chapter by presenting all of the thesis' preliminary materials. It begins with the rationale, then moves on to the study's purpose and objectives, research questions, significance, and scope. The study's organization is presented in the last section of the research. Rationale Languages are tools to communicate, in a sense, means to convey thoughts, ideas, concepts, or even a feeling via numerous talks, videos, news, and commentaries which have been carried out to provide information about every aspect of life.
World Cup 2022 is considered the most popular sporting event in the world, which attracts billions of people. As a result, there are news articles about the problems happening on the sidelines of the biggest tournament on the planet. However, online newspaper commentaries are considered an effective tool for reflecting on the issues of this tournament as well as being one of the most popular approaches for those who want to update large amounts of the World Cup’s information. Indeed, the success of any online commentary depends not only on how influential the issues are but on how well the reporters themselves know how to communicate their findings to the audience.
Among them, CNN, Fox Sports, and Reuters are considered as reliable information channels to reflect as well as express different views on the impact of this sporting event. There is no denying that the framework of Appraisal Theory, which was conducted by a group of scholars led by two linguists, namely James Martin and Peter White in the 1980s and 1990s, is considered the theory in psychology that emotions are extracted from our evaluations (appraisals or 2 estimates) of events that cause specific reactions in different people. Essentially, our appraisal of a situation causes an emotional or affective, response that is going to be based on that appraisal. Appraisal framework, according to Martin and White (2005), is a specific approach to exploring, describing, and explaining how language is used to evaluate, adopt stances, construct textual personas, and manage interpersonal positioning and relationships.
Therefore, Appraisal framework is seen as an effective tool for analyzing attitude expressions and interpersonal meanings in various types of discourse such as literary works, advertisements, talks, news, academic and narrative discourse. There have been some studies carried out, using the Appraisal Theory as a theoretical framework. Mohammed (2016) focuses on exploring the Appraisal election defeat concession the presidents’ speeches. Hood (2004) and Liu (2010) try to apply Appraisal Theory into teaching process in an attempt to get better results for students of English.
Vo Duy Duc (2011) studies journalistic voices operating in English Vietnamese hard news reports in the light of Appraisal Theory. Nguyen Thi Thu Hien (2016) carries out researching the social attitudes in news reports towards President Obama’s visit to Vietnam. As a result, it can be found that Appraisal Theory has been applied in a wide variety of genres, which proves its significance as a theoretical framework to help understand the evaluative language. However, it seems that no prior research has been done on the study of attitudinal resources in online newspaper commentaries on a global sporting event like World Cup, which means there is a gap available for my thesis.
It is for these reasons that I am inspired and motivated to conduct a study on the attitudinal aspects of online newspaper commentaries about the World 3 Cup 2022 with the topic: “An Appraisal Study of Attitudinal Resources in Online Newspaper Commentaries on the World Cup 2022”. Aim and objectives 1. Aim of the study The aim of the study is to investigate Attitudinal Resources used in online newspaper commentaries on the World Cup 2022 from the perspective of Appraisal Theory to find out the way English authors show their attitudes on such issues. Objectives of the study For the aforementioned aim to be fulfilled, the research concentrated on the following objectives: - To realize Attitudinal Resources used in online newspaper commentaries on the World Cup 2022; - To identify the frequency of occurrence of subtypes of Attitudinal Resources used in online newspaper commentaries on the World Cup 2022.
Research questions Based on the aim of the study, the following research questions are expected to be answered: 1. What Attitudinal Resources are realized in online newspaper commentaries on the World Cup 2022? 2. How often are the subtypes of Attitudinal Resources used in online newspaper commentaries on the World Cup 2022? 1. Scope of the study Though the Appraisal Theory is composed of three domains, precisely Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, this study focuses on the Attitudinal resources, namely Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation due to their considerable significance in revealing attitudes meeting the aim of the study.
4 To reach the aim, 20 online newspaper commentaries will be gathered from the websites https://edition.com/, https://www.com/, https://www. These commentaries are all collected from the reliable resources from November 2022 to December 2022 - the period that The World Cup 2022 became a topical issue and attract on people all around the world, especially fans of football. Significance of the study This study is expected to contribute to the research, performance, and interpretation of attitudinal values from theoretical as well as practical perspectives. Moreover, this study may be a new approach to gaining insight into the features of attitudinal values conveyed by online newspaper commentaries on the World Cup 2022.
Additionally, it is supposed to provide a reliable reference for readers who are interested in attitudinal values so that they are likely to have a thorough grasp of the evaluative language.