Appraisal in Political Discourse: A Study of Iranians and Americans’ Newspaper Opinion Articles

This paper examined newspapers discourse from a linguistic point of view with special focus on Iranian political issues. The present paper sets out to explore the frequency of attitude strategies used in Iranian local English newspapers and international English newspapers. To this end, the news articles from three local English newspapers and three international English newspapers were randomly selected and analyzed in view of Martin and White s (2005) framework in order to examine attitude strategies (i.e. affect, judgment, appreciation) employed in the two corpora. The UAM corpus tool version 3.3 is used for annotating the corpus. The major findings are as follows: First, political news writers use appreciation words more than other strategies. Respectively judgment and affect have the lowest frequency in both local and international corpora. Moreover, inscribed evaluation and positive appraisal resources are most frequently used in political news articles. Second, there are no significant differences between local English newspapers and international English newspapers in using attitude strategies. It can be argued that as political news is dealing with real event and social phenomena, writers widely use appreciation and judgment strategies to impress the readers. In other words, if affect strategies are widely used in news, then it may influence the objectivity and reality required by news

Keywords:

Appraisal framework , Attitude strategies , Affect , Judgment , Appreciation