Appraisal theory

This book aims to shed light on how different national and cultural communities across the world have dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic since its inception at the start of 2020. The public debates about the pandemic have articulated a vast range of critical reflections on communication: agenda-setting, categorisation and metaphorisation of the illness and the administrative responses to it, perceived ‘performances’ of specific governments and administrations in dealing with it, as well as empathy (and lack of it) in the communication of doctors, carers, patients, patients’ relatives, public services and further social institutions involved in dealing with the crisis.
The present volume provides exemplary case-studies of key aspects in the of public debates during the first year of the pandemic:
● How was the pandemic, its official existence and nature, defined and categorized at national and international level?
● How has the public been guided to understand the pandemic and how does this guidance work?
● Why and how has the management of the pandemic been imagined as a war – and what implications does the use of this conceptual metaphor have for the course of the debate?
● How are the intra- and inter-national conflicts and rivalries that arise from the pandemic articulated?
● How do nation-states, health institutions and non-governmental organisations foster solidarity and conflict resolution in the context of the pandemic?

Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005), an approach to discourse analysis dealing with evaluative language, has been previously employed in analysing newspaper articles and spoken discourses in several earlier studies, although it is gaining in popularity as a framework for comparing first and second (L1/L2) writing. This study investigated 40 English majors' Vietnamese and English paragraphs for evaluative language, a key component of successful academic writing, as realised under Appraisal theory. To this purpose, we collected L1 Vietnamese and L2 English data from the same student writers across the same topics and using a corpus-informed Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis approach to the annotation and analysis of appraisal. A range of commonalities were present in the use of appraisal across the two language varieties, while the results also suggest significant differences between students' evaluative expressions in Vietnamese as a mother tongue and English as a second or foreign language. This variation includes the comparative under-and over-use of specific appraisal resources employed in L1 and L2 writing respectively, in particular, regarding writers' employment of attitudinal features. The findings serve to inform future pedagogical applications regarding explicit instruction in stance and appraisal features for novice L2 English writers in Vietnam. 1. BACKGROUND In Vietnam, English has increased in prominence as the main foreign language taught in primary, secondary and tertiary institutions. As many second language (L2) learners in other countries, Vietnamese students do not use English for everyday communication outside the classroom, so it does not seem easy for them to master L2 English. Of the four skills, writing has been found to be one of the most difficult for Vietnamese learners to acquire in both Vietnamese as a first language (L1), as well as L2 English, as observed in Bailey (2006: vii) in that such students "often find the written demands of their courses very challenging." For this reason, there is now an increasing amount of research dealing with L2 English writing in both Vietnam and other nearby countries, such as Cambodia,

EXTENDED ABSTRACT

Introduction: The discourse of op-ed articles, a type of media discourse, aims to affect or persuade people. While giving information and commenting on the current affairs, op-ed article writers make implicit or explicit linguistic choices and express their attitude and judgment in line with their own ideology and the ideology of the newspaper they are a member of.  The system of Attitude is a category within the framework of Appraisal Theory in which writers or speakers express their subjective positions through evaluative linguistic resources. Judgment which is a sub-category of this system is about the expressions via which the ideas, actions or utterances of people or groups are admired/criticized/, or praised/condemned which are called judgments of Social Esteem and Social Sanction respectively. Social Esteem consists of three categories: Normality, Capacity, and Tenacity. Social Sanction on the other hand, consists of Veracity and Propriety. They all have positive and negative aspects as well. In this regard, it provides a comprehensive analysis for revealing the attitudes and judgments of op-ed article writers. Objective:  The objective of our study is to find out if there is a preferred type of Judgment by op-ed article writers and whether the political ideology of the newspaper has an effect in the selection of the Judgment type. Data base and Methodology: To this end, the op-ed articles written on current political issues in six different Turkish daily newspapers published between 10-24 November, 2014 known to be representing different political ideologies, i.e. Secular (Cumhuriyet, Aydınlık), Liberal (Hürriyet, Milliyet), and Islamist were chosen as our database. With ‘selected sampling’ method, these newspapers were classified according to the topics. During this period, op-ed articles were mainly on six topics: AKP government, PKK/Resolution process, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, CHP, Atatürk, and The Congregation/Parallel Structure. The topics on which less than 10 articles were written on were regarded as miscellaneous and thus 327 out of 476 articles were analyzed for the linguistic resources expressing Judgment. In order to answer our first research question, the linguistic resources were grouped according to the types of Judgment and their sub-types, the percentage of the frequency of their usage was taken. Then, for answering our second question, the relation between the frequency and ideology has been researched. Findings: The analysis of our database reveals that except for the Capacity the writers of Liberal ideology prefer using the positive dimension of Social Esteem judgments Normality and Tenacity most and the negative dimension the least. The percentage of Capacity judgment is high both in the positive and negative aspects in all ideologies; though the highest ratio is in the newspapers adopting Islamic ideology (43.55%). On the other hand, op-ed articles in the newspapers of Secular ideology make use of negative Normality and Tenacity judgments more frequently than the others. Judging from these findings, it can be alleged that writers of liberal ideology refrain from making negative judgments as the ideology requires them to be “middle of the roader” and expressing their opinions sharply. Writers in the newspapers of Secular and Islamist ideology on the other hand, can be argued to attempt to judge the “others” using linguistic resources expressing ‘negative Social Esteem Judgment’ as a persuading strategy. Relating Social Sanction judgments, both positive and negative aspects of Veracity and Propriety are used in similar frequency in all ideologies; however negative Social Sanction judgments are used in higher percentage. This shows that in line with Social Esteem judgments, writers prefer to emphasize the negative sanction about the “other” person or groups. When the Social Esteem and Social Sanction judgments are considered as a whole, it has been detected that negative aspects of all judgment types outweigh the positive ones. The most frequent negative judgement type is Social Sanction of Propriety (Secular 39%; Liberal 32.4%; Islamist 40%). Social Sanction of Veracity follows this (Secular 23%; Liberal 17%; Islamist 20.3%). Compared to the judgments of Social Sanction, Social Esteem judgments are found to be used much less frequently in op-ed articles. This finding reveals that Social Sanction is the preferred type of judgment in Turkish op-ed articles. As for the effect of ideology, in newspapers of Liberal ideology, positive dimensions of Social Esteem judgments and Social Sanction judgment of Veracity are used at a higher percentage than in newspapers of Secular and Islamist ideology, which have higher percentage of negative judgments.  Conclusion: In conclusion, the research questions aiming to find out whether in the genre of op-ed articles opt for a type of Judgment and if the political ideology of the newspaper is effective in this, have been answered within the scope of this study. The analysis of the database shows that 793 of 1031 linguistic resources (i.e. 77%) are used to express negative judgment, which means that writers prefer to use negative judgment expressions in op-ed articles so that they can criticize and condemn the ‘others’ and persuade their readers in line with their opinions. Regarding the answer to our second research question, it was determined that political ideology is effective on the type and dimension of the judgment used. In the op-ed articles from newspapers of Liberal ideology, the percentage of linguistic resources expressing positive judgment is higher than the ones from other ideologies. However in articles from the newspapers of Secular and Islamist ideology, linguistic resources of positive judgment are more frequent. Thus, it can be concluded that political ideology is an important factor in the choice of judgement type and dimension.
Keywords: Appraisal Theory, System of Attitude, Judgment, Media Discourse, Op-Ed Articles

The growth of internet has prompt online marketing intelligence activities. Twitter becomes most popular social media in Indonesia and provides millions of text data. People share their opinion and emotions by their tweets. This phenomenon gives an opportunity to conduct a research for sentiment analysis. In this research we use appraisal theory that can analyze the emotions on the tweets according to basic descriptions on appraisal theory that include attitude, graduation and engagement towards products. We apply this theory in sentiment analysis using Bahasa Indonesia to determine and compare positive and negative sentiment of popular smartphone products in Indonesia, which is Lumia and Xperia. We perform calculation based on target and appraisal related, in the sentences level and the tweets level. The results of this research can be used as knowledge and consideration for business especially marketing intelligence field. Based on the calculations, Lumia have more positive results than Xperia.