Cover not available
Part of
Style and Reader Response: Minds, media, methods
Edited by Alice Bell, Sam Browse, Alison Gibbons and David Peplow
[Linguistic Approaches to Literature 36] 2021
► pp. 143–162

Chapter 8
Evaluating news events

Using appraisal for reader response

| University of Birmingham
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Reader response to news media
  • 3.Evaluative language analysis
    • 3.1Appreciation
    • 3.2Appraisal and news values
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1News texts collection
    • 4.2Interview collection
    • 4.3Analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Reader response through negative quality
      • Similarities in negative quality use
    • 5.2Differences in news event evaluations using negative quality
    • 5.3Summary of Results
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 8 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lal.36.08van
References (70)
Allington, D. & Swann, J.
2009 Researching literary reading as social practice. Language and Literature 18(3): 219–230. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, M. M.
1981 The Dialogic Imagination. Texas: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
BBC
2014a As it happened: Gaza conflict intensifies. BBC.com, 20 July 2014, [URL] (31 May 2017).Google Scholar
2014b Gaza shelling by Israel leads to deadliest day of conflict. BBC.com, 20 July 2014, [URL] (31 May 2017).Google Scholar
2014c Gaza crisis: Toll of operations in Gaza. BBC.com, 1 September 2014, [URL] (31 May 2017).Google Scholar
Bednarek, M.
2008 Emotion Talk across Corpora. Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bednarek, M. & Caple, H.
2012 News Discourse. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
2014 Why do news values matter? Towards a new methodological framework for analysing news discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and beyond. Discourse & Society 25(2): 135–158. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 The Discourse of News Values. How News Organizations Create Newsworthiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bell, A.
1991 The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bunz, M.
2010 Google’s news experiment Living Stories to go open source. TheGuardian.co.uk, 17 February 2010, [URL] (24 April 2018).Google Scholar
Charmaz, K.
2006 Constructing Grounded Theory. A Practice Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. London: SAGE.Google Scholar
Coffin, C. & O’Halloran, K.
2005 Finding the global groove: theorising and analysing dynamic reader positioning using Appraisal, corpus and a concordancer. Critical Discourse Studies 2(2): 143–163. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cooper, C. R.
1976 Empirical studies of response to literature: review and suggestions. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 10(3/4): 77–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cotter, C.
2010 News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Don, A. C.
2009 Legitimating tenor relationships: Affiliation and alignment in written interaction. Linguistics and the Human Sciences 5(3): 303–327.Google Scholar
2016 It’s hard to mesh all this: Invoking attitude, persona and argument organisation. Functional Linguistics 3(9): n.p.Google Scholar
Dörnyei, Z.
2007 Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Drasovean, A. & Tagg, C.
2015 Evaluative language and its solidarity-building role on TED.com: an Appraisal and corpus analysis. Language@Internet 12: n.p.Google Scholar
Du Bois, J. W.
2007 The stance triangle. In Stancetaking in Discourse, R. Englebretson (ed.), 139–182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DuBois, J. W. & Kärkkäinen, E.
2012 Taking a stance on emotion: affect, sequence, and intersubjectivity in dialogic interaction. Text&Talk 32(4): 433–451.Google Scholar
Englebretson, R.
2007 Stancetaking in Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eriksson Barajas, K.
2015 Discursive reception studies – a path toward knowledge about fiction in everyday life. Journal of Literary Theory 9(1): 4–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, N.
1995 Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Fowler, R.
1991 Language in the News. Discourse and Ideology in the Press. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Franklin, B. & Eldridge, S. A.
2017 The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fuoli, M.
2018 A step-wise method for annotating Appraisal. Functions of Language 25(2): 229–258. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fuoli, M. & Hommerberg, C.
2015 Optimising transparency, reliability and replicability: annotation principles and inter-coder agreement in the quantification of evaluative expressions. Corpora 10(3): 315–349. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Galtung, J. & Ruge, M. H.
1965 The structure of foreign news. Journal of Peace Research 2(1): 64–91. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. & Hunston, S.
2016 Corpora and beyond – investigating evaluation in discourse: Introduction to the special issue on corpus approaches to evaluation. Corpora 11(2): 131–141. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hall, G.
2009 Texts, readers – and real readers. Language and Literature 18(3): 331–337. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harcup, T. & O’Neill, D.
2016 What is news?: News values revisited (again). Journalism Studies 18(12): 1470–1488. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hermida, A.
2016 Social media and the news. In The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism, T. Witschge, C. W. Anderson, D. Domingo & A. Hermida (eds), 81–94. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hommerberg, C.
2015 Bringing consumption reviews into relief by combining Appraisal and argumentation analysis. Text&Talk 35(2): 155–175.Google Scholar
Hunston, S. & Sinclair, J.
2000 A local grammar of evaluation. In Evaluation in Text, S. Hunston & G. Thompson (eds), 74–101. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Klemenz-Belgardt, E.
1981 American research on response to literature: The empirical studies. Poetics 10: 357–380. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lehman-Wilzig, S. N. & Seletzky, M.
2010 Hard news, soft news, ‘general’ news: The necessity and utility of an intermediate classification. Journalism 11(1): 37–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Y. K.
2016 The impact of recurrent propositions on readers’ perceptions of gist: a study of hard news. Text&Talk 36(1): 67–87.Google Scholar
Lynfield, B.
2015 Gaza, a year on from Operation Protective Edge: The traumatised kibbutz on Israel’s front line, still recovering from last summer’s war with Hamas. The Independent.co.uk, 6 July 2015 [URL] (24 April 2018)Google Scholar
Macken-Horarik, M.
2003 Appraisal and the special instructiveness of narrative. Text 23(2): 285–312. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, J. R.
1995 Reading positions/positioning readers: Judgment in English. Prospect: A Journal of Australian TESOL 10(2): 27–37.Google Scholar
Martin, J. R. & White, P. R. R.
2005 The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English. Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miall, D. S.
2006 Empirical approaches to studying literary readers: The state of the discipline. Book History 9: 291–311. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miall, D. S. & Kuiken, D.
1994 Foregrounding, defamiliarisation, and affect: Response to literary studies. Poetics 22: 389–407. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Myrick, J. G. & Wojdynski, B.
2016 Moody news: The impact of collective emotion ratings on online news consumers’ attitudes toward and memory for content. New Media & Society 18(11): 2576–2594. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Newman, N., Fletcher, R., Kalogeropoulos, A., Levy, D. L. & Nielsen, R. K.
2017 Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017. Reuters Institute for Journalism Studies [URL] (9 January 2018)Google Scholar
Nuttall, L.
2017 Online readers between the camps: A Text World Theory analysis of ethical positioning in We Need to Talk About Kevin . Language and Literature 26(2): 153–171. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ofcom
2018 News Consumption in the UK: 2018. Ofcom.org.uk [URL] (30 November 2018)Google Scholar
Peplow, D. & Carter, R.
2014 Stylistics and real readers. In The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics, M. Burke (ed.), 440–454. London: Routledge. Google Scholar
Precht, K.
2003 Stance moods in spoken English: Evidentiality and affect in British and American conversation. Text 23(2): 239–257. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Read, J. & Carroll, J.
2012 Annotating expressions of Appraisal in English. Language Resources & Evaluation 46: 421–447. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sabao, C.
2016 Arguments for an Appraisal linguistic discourse approach to the analysis of ‘objectivity’ in ‘hard’ news reports. African Journalism Studies 37(1): 40–63. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steensen, S.
2014 Conversing the audience: A methodological exploration of how conversation analysis can contribute to the analysis of interactive journalism. New Media & Society 16(8): 1197–1213. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Teo, P.
2000 Racism in the news: A critical discourse analysis of news reporting in two Australian newspapers. Discourse & Society 11(1): 7–49. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tereszkiewicz, A.
2014 “I’m Not Sure What That Means Yet, But We’ll Soon Find Out”: The discourse of newspaper live blogs. Studia Linguistica Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis 131(3): 299–319.Google Scholar
The Guardian
2015a Oregon college shooting: Gunman identified as Chris Harper Mercer – as it happened. The Guardian, 14 July 2017 [URL] (1 December 2017).Google Scholar
2015b “Another mass shooting in America”: Oregon killings a grim familiarity for US. The Guardian, 2 October 2015 [URL] (9 January 2018).Google Scholar
Thompson, G.
2014 Affect and emotion, target-value mismatches, and Russian dolls: Refining the Appraisal model. In Evaluation in Context, G. Thompson & L. Alba-Juez (eds), 47–66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thompson, G. & Hunston, S.
2000 Evaluation: An Introduction. In Evaluation in Text. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, S. Hunston & G. Thompson (eds), 1–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thurman, N. & Newman, N.
2014 The future of breaking news online? Journalism Studies 15(5): 655–667. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thurman, N. & Schapals, A. K.
2016 Live blogs, sources, and objectivity: The contradictions of real-time online reporting. In The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies, B. Franklin & S. Eldridge (eds), 283–292. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thurman, N. & Walters, A.
2013 Live blogging – digital journalism’s pivotal platform? A case study of the production, consumption, and form of live blogs at Guardian.co.uk . Digital Journalism 1(1): 82–101. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Van Dijk, T. A.
1988 News as Discourse. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers.Google Scholar
Van Driel, M.
2020 “It makes it more real”: A comparative analysis of Twitter use in live blogs and quotations in older news media from a reader response perspective. In Message and Medium: English Language Practices Across New and Old Media, C. Tagg & M. Evans (eds), 306–328. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Van Peer, W.
1983 Poetic style and reader response: An exercise in empirical studies. Journal of Literary Semantics 12(2): 3–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
White, P. R. R.
2003 Beyond modality and hedging: A dialogic view of the language of intersubjective stance. Text 23(2): 259–284. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2012 Exploring the axiological workings of ‘reporter voice’ news stories – attribution and Attitudinal positioning. Discourse, Context & Media 1(2/3): 57–67. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Whiteley, S. & Canning, P.
2017 Reader response research in stylistics. Language and Literature 26(2): 71–87. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Witschge, T., Anderson, C. W., Domingo, D. & Hermida, A.
2016 The SAGE Handbook of Digital Journalism. London: SAGE. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by 1 other publications

Price, Hazel
2022. The year’s work in stylistics 2021. Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 31:4 ► pp. 519 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.