Attitudinal Positioning Research Articles

Negotiating the value of rule of law through attitudinal positioning

Abstract This article examines how the value of rule of law is negotiated through public prosecutors’ attitudinal positioning of themselves and defendants in courtroom discourse. A corpus-based analysis of 120 recent Chinese digital indictments revealed that the evaluative stances of public prosecutors toward themselves invariably imply positive judgment of capacity and legal propriety in their legal investigation, thus constructing a stable and authoritative image of law enforcers. Their attitudes toward defendants are mainly negative judgments of both moral and legal propriety through various criminal actions, creating a predominantly evil image of law violators with different personae. It is through these sharply different patterns of discourse representation that public prosecutors tactically construct and negotiate attitudes toward crime and justice, thus establishing mainstream judicial values during legal proceedings. This study may shed new light on the research of legal argumentation for negotiating judicial values under the civil law system in this digital era.

Negotiation of justice: the discursive construction of attitudinal positioning in bilingual legal judgments of HKSAR v KWAN WAN KI

Abstract In appeal cases, judges from different levels of courts may have varying perspectives on the same set of facts, leading to different sentencing decisions. This study focuses on a specific traffic incident case in Hong Kong. In this case, a trial judge and a collegial panel at the High Court hold divergent opinions regarding the same set of facts, expressed through two different narrations and varying degrees of leniency in their rulings. By applying the framework of Appraisal Theory within a contextualized analysis, this paper reveals that the trial judge and the appellate judges employ differing amounts of evaluative expressions in reaching their decisions. I argue that evaluative language functions as a discursive strategy for negotiating justice, encompassing the narration of legal facts and the construction of legal arguments across different levels of the court system. Furthermore, through an examination of discrepancies between the two language versions, I contend that evaluative expressions, particularly the degree of attitude within the Appraisal Framework, warrant attention in the practice of legal translation. This attention is crucial for achieving a consistent level of emotive entropy in both language versions.

An Appraisal of Burki’s Attitudinal Positioning in Shaping his Authorial Voice

The current study aimed to investigate that how an eminent Pakistani writer Hamidullah Khan Burki constructed his attitudinal positioning that shaped his authorial voice in journalistic discourse. The study focused on two aspects: to explore the patterns in Burki’s use of attitudinal resources through lexical choices; and to investigate that how the appraised categories shape Burki’s authorial voice through attitudinal positioning. The current research is a case study, exploratory in nature, which used QUAL-Quan model of mixed method research. After collection of data in the form of 20 journalistic articles of Burki through purposive sampling about politics in Pakistan, the three-dimensional appraisal framework was used to analyze the data qualitatively in the light of Martin & White (2005) Appraisal Theory, which consisted of Attitude Types, Polarity and Appraised Categories. The data was annotated accordingly through UAM Corpus Tool Version 6.2 to generate automatic results for computing the frequency and percentage of various categories in a quick, accurate and systematic manner. The statistical results and subsequent discussion have provided valuable findings in a systematic and objective manner regarding important features and patterns in Burki’s attitudinal positioning that shape his authorial voice. The most dominating feature is the use of appraisal resources of Judgement for shaping his authorial voice. Moreover, he has overall used negative evaluative resources more frequently as compared to positive evaluative resources in his articles. Hence, the findings of the current study depict that Appraisal Theory has provided a comprehensive, systematic and objective framework for appraisal of journalistic discourse.

Perceptions of a human rights lens in relation to the training of social work field educators

Use of a human rights (HR) framework in direct social work practice is gaining traction in social work education. A gap remains, however, regarding its application within field education. This study seeks to fill the gap in knowledge regarding field educators’ understanding of and training in use of a human rights lens. Using a qualitative-dominant, mixed-method, quasi-experimental design, the study explores the extent to which the introduction of a human rights-based approach to social work impacts both the attitudinal positioning of field educators (preceptors) in a small clinically based MSW program toward HR based clinical practice, and the integration of this approach to their pedagogical practice with MSW-level field students. Participants were administered the Human Rights Lens in Social Work (HRLSW) scale as both a pre- and posttest, provided a training on human rights concepts, and participated in a focus group discussion. Although there was only a small improvement in scores, participants reported qualitative evidence that the training started a shift in their thinking. Participants also indicated that more training would be well received.

Narrator profile in translation: Work-in-progress for a semiautomatic analysis of narratorial dialogistic and attitudinal positioning in translated fiction

This paper presents work-in-progress for the development of a semi-automatic methodology for the analysis of shifts in narrator profile in translated fiction. Such a methodology is developed for a comparative quantitative analysis of electronic source and target texts organized in a parallel corpus. The first and main part of this paper presents the theoreti-cal motivation for the organization of two systems of categories focusing on the relationship between the two discursive centres involved in reported speech - narrator and character (but also quoter and quotee in other text types) - by developing the proposals of dialogistic/intertextual and attitu-dinal positioning in Appraisal Theory. The second part of this paper ana-lyses a selection of examples illustrative of such cate gories, and presents and comments the results of the comparative quantitative analysis of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and eight European Portuguese translations for juvenile and adult readerships. This comparative analysis proves the methodology operative and shows evidence of two tendencies: ‘levelling-out’ and ‘explicitation’, which, although elsewhere identified as trans-lational universals, may here be identified as norms because they correlate with the independent variable target readership. The purpose of developing this methodology is to help describe the way interlingual translation may transform narrator profile as well as contribute to the formulation of trans-lational norms.

A discourse dynamics exploration of attitudinal responses towards COVID-19 in academia and media

AbstractThis study analyzes attitudinal positioning in academic and media discourse pertaining to COVID-19 from the COVID-19 Corpus and Coronavirus Corpus, using a discourse dynamics approach. Underpinning this approach is the Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST), which we employ to examine the discursive practices of a discourse event across time periods (timescales). The analysis identified significant differences in attitudinal markers and noteworthy developmental patterns in attitude positioning; the developmental trajectories of attitude construction were characterized by a nonlinear developmental pattern subject to fluctuations and variability. We also discerned the existence of dynamic interaction between the uses of attitudinal markers and the reported cases of COVID-19. Methodologically, we demonstrate how the integration of the discourse dynamics approach with corpus linguistics strengthens the social contextualization of data by enabling the identification of developmental patterns of targeted language features over time, and the interconnections of these language features with contextually important social factors.

Attitudinal Positioning and Journalistic Commentary in Politically Fraught Circumstances: Editorializing About the Killing of Osama bin Laden

This study explores the strategic use of resources for conveying attitudinal assessments by journalists when their communicative options are seriously curtailed—when there are severe social, legal, or political constraints on what they can say about powerful people and institutions. It offers, by way of a case study, an analysis of editorials published in two Pakistani English-language newspapers the day after the US forces covertly entered Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. Whereas these actions raised serious questions about the prior conduct of the Pakistani military and intelligence services, the journalists were prevented by strict legal prohibitions from any overt criticism. Through an appraisal-framework analysis, this study describes the ‘oblique’ attitudinal style used in the two editorials to advance cases which position readers to view those involved in an extremely negative light.

The Impact of Image on Translation Decision-Making in Dubbing into Arabic – Premeditated Manipulation par Excellence: The Exodus Song as a Case Study

Abstract The emblematic connotations and ideological values of images affect the way iconographic and visual codes are interpreted in dubbing. Religion, culture, and politics are all primary variables that communicate evaluative views of the world, but also impose pressure on the translator when they stand in conflict with his or her attitudinal positioning and ethical judgement. Thus, this article aims to examine how the interplay between iconographic and linguistic codes of the visual sign in the musical animation This Land is Mine impacts translational decision-making in dubbing into Arabic. Simultaneously, the aim of this article is to evaluate how religious, cultural, and ideological dissonances between source text and target audience result in acts of manipulation and negotiation of meaning in the target text that explicitly channels the voice of the translator. We employ a dual theoretical approach combining narrative theory and appraisal theory in order to evaluate patterns of manipulation within a scaled system to provide graded analysis that exposes the ideological stance and bias of the source text’s producer/animator in representing reality via visual narrative.

Ideology, attitudinal positioning, and the blockchain: a social semiotic approach to understanding the values construed in the whitepapers of blockchain start-ups

ABSTRACT Recent work on algorithmic bias has shown that understanding the values embedded in technology design processes is important for avoiding social harm. This paper explores the attitudes construed in whitepapers of blockchain technology start-ups. Blockchain technology is a relatively new phenomenon that has informed discourses about the future of governance and economics in relation to the internet. This study aims to understand the values discursively construed in the whitepapers of four blockchain start-ups: Steemit, Creativechain, Democracy Earth, and Bitnation. It adopts a corpus linguistics approach, and uses the Appraisal framework (Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan) to analyse the evaluative meanings expressed in the whitepaper dataset. This analysis reveals that the blockchain start-ups manifest shared values around the concepts of decentralisation, trust in algorithms, and trust in individuals over institutions. The start-ups enact different political orientations, expressing ideals related to the digital commons, cyber-libertarianism, and capitalism. The corpus-based linguistic analysis used in this study offers a method that may be applicable to other areas of technology discourse where whitepapers and design documents tend to embed covert political and ideological positions.

The Bangkok Blast as a finger-pointing blame game

Abstract This article sets out to explore the potential of journalistic attitudinal positioning in dis/aligning readers into different feeling and moral communities in traumatic news event. To do so, it utilises the appraisal framework to examine how the Bangkok Post and the New York Times present and represent ‘attitude’ of different news actors in the coverage of the Bangkok Blast. Analytical findings show that while journalistic attitudinal positioning constitutes a means of political empowerment through bringing in otherwise marginal and silenced voices, it also opens up a space for journalists to evaluate risks and negotiate responsibilities. News reports of the Bangkok Blast eventually construe the Thai society as divided by representing the event as a blame game. The findings also extend the conceptual scope of symbolic codes of victims, villain and hero by resorting to attitudinal resources.

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation of the Russian-Turkish Conflict in Western and Arab Newspapers: An Appraisal Model

News articles vary considerably in ideological perspective depending on the type and the stance of the newspaper. The present study employs CDA approach with a view of assessing the Western and Arab newspaper articles motivated by a specific ideology with regard to the ongoing conflict between Turkey and Russia after the downing of the Russian Su-24 on 24 November 2015. It aims at showing how the portrayal of the Self and Other reveal the hidden ideologies of these newspapers. Additionally, the present study aims to explore the evaluative stances and attitudinal positioning of Western and Arab newspapers. The study draws on Van Dijk’s (1998) ideological square of positive Self-presentation and negative Other – presentation to clarify different views and ideologies. The Appraisal model is the linguistic framework employed in the current study at both qualitative and quantitative levels. The data comprises of 68 articles taken from Western newspapers and news agencies and 30 news report from the Arab newspapers. The findings of the analysis in both Arab and Western Newspapers indicate that the number of judgmental resources exceeds that of affectual resources in both Western and the Arab newspapers. This means there is an emphasis on constructing an ideology that appeals to the readers’ moral and social rather than emotional aspects that invites the readers' sympathy.

Translating Ambivalent Sexist Attitudes toward Women in Pulau Buru Quartet: An Appraisal Theory Approach

Indonesian classic literary works culturally represent ambivalent sexist attitudes toward women. Instead of campaign againts sexism in most of countries, the novelist directly or indirectly plays role in the case of spreading out sexism. The track record of Indonesian literary works in wide world literature exposes that Pulau Buru quartet written by Pramoedya Ananta Toer has obtained special attention by readers over the globe. It has been translated into more than 40 foreign languages. Due to the phenomena, the research is conducted to examine how the translator translates the utterances which contain ambivalent sexist attitutes toward women in English version. The research is focused on analyzing the application of translation techniques and the impact to its translation quality. The results reveals that translator shows a contradictive attitudinal positioning. It means that the translator both takes it for granted and retains ambivalent sexist attitudes in the target text. Simultaneously, the translator attempts to make censorship for the issues. It is evidently reflected by the application of translation techniques. Both of translator’s decisions dealing with the choice of applying translation techniques impacts its translation quality. Therefore, it is product oriented translation research. Consequently, it needs futher research to dig up the translator’s reasons dealing with the absence and existence of ambivalent sexist attitudes in the target text.

Interpersonal rhetoric of attitude in news

Abstract Drawing on principles of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) the proposed study examined and compared the attitudinal positioning of both CNN and Al-Jazeera English (AJE) concerning Iran’s Nuclear Program (INP). The paper has employed the appraisal framework (Martin & White 2005) to reveal the different subtypes of attitude, i.e., affect, judgment, and appreciation, which have been encoded in the selected news items. It has been found that AJE discourse is highly evaluated. AJE has appraised INP positively; yet, it has evaluated Iran (apart from INP) and the US negatively. Unlike CNN, it is very obvious that AJE has various agendas. To achieve its goals, AJE has employed judgment more than the other subsystems of attitude. This is not surprising, given that the function of judgment is to judge people and their actions rather than things. This may explain why AJE news coverage is biased. On the other hand, although CNN relies heavily on appreciation, its coverage is biased as well. Indirectly through appreciating INP as being a nuclear weapons program, CNN has tried to invoke readers’ judgment of Iran. In addition, CNN has highlighted aspects of their opposition towards Iran such as unity, unification, consensus, etc, through the use of (+sec). Unlike AJE, CNN has one agenda and they achieved it through appraising the “self” positively and the “other”, i.e., Iran negatively.

Clichés as evaluative resources: A socio-cognitive study

AbstractIn this article, I explore clichés as socio-cognitive resources that enable the expression of attitudinal positioning in interaction. I examine a corpus of 150 clichés collected from a variety of publicly available sources and illustrate their function by exploring how they are used to convey evaluation in institutional meetings. By co-deploying the attitude system of the appraisal framework with socio-cognitive discourse analysis tools, I argue that clichés can be used to provoke evaluation through the socio-cognitive resources they evoke given the shared knowledge contained within them. The findings indicate that the majority of evaluative instances relate to performance or ability of human entities by reference to basic aspects of human experience contained in the socio-cognitive representations evoked. The article also finds that the provoked attitudinal values work in a cumulative way to create a flow of evaluative patterns, which, in turn, contributes to our understanding of the interpersonal function they perform, i.e. persuade, urge action and save face. The paper argues that the co-deployment of both approaches allows the investigation of clichés as resources for covertly expressing evaluation by reference to knowledge shared by the interlocutors.

Lexical Metaphor as Judgment: Attitudinal positioning of editorial writers in business newspapers

Drawing on appraisal theory, this paper aims to analyze how the attitudinal positioning of writers of the editorials of business newspapers can be construed by means of lexical metaphors. The focus is on judgment, the evaluation of human actors, because it indicates the subjective presence of a writer. Based on a dataset o3f 32 editorials of two Finnish business newspapers, the results show that the lexical metaphors used during assessments are mostly dead metaphors, representing the source domains of competition and sports, humans and animals, and war, battle, and violence. The most common targets of judgment are institutional actors that are described by the meanings of capacity, tenacity, and propriety. Economic actors are mostly evaluated positively while political actors are mostly evaluated negatively. Cases where economic actors are evaluated negatively and where individual persons are mentioned are unusual but do arise. In general, judgments in editorials reflect the shared values and ideological beliefs of the papers and their readers. Lexical metaphors offer a subtle way of praising and criticizing institutions and individual people, which makes them an important way of communicating as expected in a discourse community.

Lexical Metaphor as Judgment: Attitudinal positioning of editorial writers in business newspapers

Drawing on appraisal theory, this paper aims to analyze how the attitudinal positioning of writers of the editorials of business newspapers can be construed by means of lexical metaphors. The focus is on judgment, the evaluation of human actors, because it indicates the subjective presence of a writer. Based on a dataset o3f 32 editorials of two Finnish business newspapers, the results show that the lexical metaphors used during assessments are mostly dead metaphors, representing the source domains of competition and sports, humans and animals, and war, battle, and violence. The most common targets of judgment are institutional actors that are described by the meanings of capacity, tenacity, and propriety. Economic actors are mostly evaluated positively while political actors are mostly evaluated negatively. Cases where economic actors are evaluated negatively and where individual persons are mentioned are unusual but do arise. In general, judgments in editorials reflect the shared values and ideological beliefs of the papers and their readers. Lexical metaphors offer a subtle way of praising and criticizing institutions and individual people, which makes them an important way of communicating as expected in a discourse community.

A Corpus-Informed Appraisal Analysis of Thai Media Representation and Attitudes Towards Red-Shirt Protesters in Political Conflicts in Thailand

This paper aims to analyze and compare representation and attitudes of media towards Red-shirt protesters in the political conflicts in Thailand between two Thai English-language newspapers: Bangkok Post and The Nation. The data were retrieved from Political online news in Thailand written in English published from 31 October to 31 December 2013. Terms related to red-shirt protesters were selected on the basis for high frequency and high keyness scores, suggesting that they played a key role and received media attention during the political turmoil. Collocations, and connotations associated with the selected terms were analyzed to show how much they reveal media attitudes. Appraisal (Martin & White, 2005) focusing on attitudinal positioning: affect, judgement, and appreciation were employed as the main analytical framework in this study. The results, based on the Appraisal analysis, showed that red-shirt protesters were evaluated in terms of affect: desire, undesire, insecurity, and dissatisfaction in Bangkok Post, and The Nation; happiness in Bangkok Post; and unhappiness in The Nation. Red-shirt protesters expressed affect on political activities, politicians, and political organization in Bangkok Post and The Nation. Types of judgement included: incapacity, and impropriety in Bangkok Post and The Nation; and tenacity, veracity, and inveracity in Bangkok Post. Red-shirt protesters were appraised by Red-shirt member opponent, and news reporter in Bangkok Post; and opponent and news reporter in The Nation. The results from judgement revealed that The Nation expressed higher negative attitudes towards Red-shirt protesters than Bangkok Post. In terms of implications, Corpus Linguistics and Appraisal Theory are beneficial for discourse analysis, particularly textual evaluation of media discourse.

Exploring the axiological workings of ‘reporter voice’ news stories—Attribution and attitudinal positioning

This paper seeks to contribute to the scholarship which is interested in the rhetorical, axiological workings of what are sometimes termed ‘hard news’ or ‘objective’ news stories—a style of news journalism typically associated with the ‘quality’ or ‘broadsheet’ news media and involving a regime of ‘strategic ‘impersonalisation’. It is interested in the communicative mechanisms by which such texts are often able to advance or favour particular value positions while employing a relatively impersonal style in which attitudinal evaluations and other potentially contentious meanings are largely confined to material attributed to quoted sources. It reviews previous research on the evaluative qualities of these texts, with special reference to the literature on attribution and so-called ‘evidentiality’ in news discourse. It is proposed that understandings of the axiological workings of these text can be enhanced by referencing some of the key insights emerging from what is termed the ‘Appraisal ‘framework’, an approach to the analysis of evaluative language developed within the Systemic Functional Linguistic paradigm of Michael Halliday and his associates. In particular it is proposed that understandings of the workings of these texts can be enhanced by referencing proposals in the Appraisal literature with respect to implicit or ‘invoked’ attitude and by reference to an account of attribution and so-called ‘evidentiality’ which is grounded in Bakhtinian notions of dialogism, rather than in notions of truth functionality and certainty-of-knowledge claims.

“Classic ageism” or “brutal economy”? Old age and older people in the Polish media

This article explores media discourse of ageing, taking the example of Poland and relating it to a broader discussion of ageing policy. The discourse in news magazines appears both to reflect and create attitudes towards older people, which in turn has implications for ageing policy. To reveal the nature of these attitudes, we use a method of attitudinal positioning. The study analyzes articles that appeared in the four largest Polish weekly opinion news magazines, in the 2004–2007 period. Various domains in the discourse of ageing are identified, yet only the family and market domains seem to be described in exclusively positive terms: the authors discuss the implications of this for ageing policy.

Is Youth a Better Predictor of Sociopolitical Values Than Is Nationality?

Using data from the World Values Survey, this article examines a series of strongly held values and beliefs concerning the political and wider social world, on a cross-nationally comparative basis. Orientations such as political outlook, attitudes toward religion, political participation, social movements, women's roles, and satisfaction with life are examined. Tentative groupings of young people by country are attempted, revealing a commonality of values among the old and young in certain clusters of societies. Within these clusters, the relative magnitude of gender and age differences in attitudinal positioning are analyzed, to show how nationality and youth interact differently when examining different attitudes. It is found that young people do have common values cross-nationally, but only within certain supranational limits.