The attitudinal resources in english and vietnamese news on the social violence

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY LÊ YẾN NHI THE ATTITUDINAL RESOURCES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NEWS ON THE SOCIAL VIOLENCE Field: English Linguistics Code: 22 02 01 Supervisor: Assoc Prof Dr Trần Văn Phƣớc BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO TRƢỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN LÊ YẾN NHI NGUỒN NGÔN NGỮ ĐÁNH GIÁ THÁI ĐỘ TRONG NHỮNG BẢN TIN TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT VỀ VẤN ĐỀ BẠO LỰC XÃ HỘI Chuyên ngành: Ngôn ngữ Anh Mã số: 22 02 01 Ngƣời hƣớng dẫn: PGS.TS Trần Văn Phƣớc I STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I certify that I am the sole author of this master thesis I have not used any sources with exception of those listed in the bibliography and identified as references I further confirm that I have not submitted this thesis at any other institution so as to obtain a degree Quy Nhon, 2020 Le Yen Nhi II ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to sincerely thank for the cooperation and support of the Department of Postgraduate Training and the Department of Foreign Languages of QNU I gratefully acknowledge my greatest thanks to my supervisor, Assoc Prof Dr Tran Van Phuoc, who has given me helpful advice and patient guidance Without his enthusiastic support, this thesis would not have been completed I am also grateful for the lecturers who have provided me with important knowledge and foundation for this master thesis I would like to say thanks to all the members in my family for their help and encouragement Last but not least, I would like to thank my mother for her continual encouragement and her generous devotion so that I could invest a lot of time in my study III ABSTRACT This thesis is a comparative study on evaluative language in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence based on the framework of Appraisal Theory developed by Martin and White The main purposes of this study are to find out how linguistic features expressing Affect is used in journalistic discourses about social violence and what the similarities and dissimilarities between two languages are The collection of 12 articles (06 English articles and 06 Vietnamese ones) randomly chosen from online press is analyzed through the adoption of quantitatively and qualitatively descriptive and contrastive methods The results of this thesis have revealed that English journalists have used different ways to express a typical sub-type of Attitude in Appraisal Theory, namely Affect and they also preferred to negatively but explicitly express Affect through verbal groups Hopefully, the findings of this study may contribute to the field research in journalism and will be useful knowledge for those who are interested in relating topics CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale Social violence is a considerable problem in the world due to a devastating impact on victims‟ physical, social and emotional development Therefore, an increased frequency and level of violent crime has been regularly reported by mass media Being one of the most useful sources of information, newspapers play an important role in providing, reflecting and evaluating social violence cases According to accurate and detailed information about social violence cases, viewers have understood the brutality and the tragedy of these incidents more fully Besides, the authors of these articles write about the emotions that victims‟ families have experienced so that everyone feels more about their hurt feelings and joins hand to oppose to social violence The pattern of usage in which evaluative language is as one of the vital tools is widely used by the journalists for their articles There have been many studies on language of evaluation in the newspapers, focusing on various topics such as football commentaries, homosexulity, education, entertainment The similarities and differences of evaluative language in different languages have been attracted the interest of many linguistics when they studied on these subjects However, to my best knowledge, there have been few studies carrying out about social violence and most of them mainly discovered different aspects such as phonological, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic features From the previous reasons, I find it vital to conduct a study with the title “The Attitudinal Resources in English and Vietnamese news on the Social Violence” in order to investigate the linguistic features of attitudinal resources used in social violence in news from the perspective of Appraisal Theory (AT) I hope that findings from this thesis will find the similarities and dissimilarities in expressions of evaluative language 1.2 Aims and objectives of the study 1.2.1 Aims of the study This paper is performed with the aim to examine the linguistic resources used to realize Affect in news about social violence in English and Vietnamese in the light of AT Besides, the similarities and differences in these features between two languages are also clarified in this research 1.2.2 Objectives of the study The study focused on the following objectives: - To examine discourse features expressing Affect in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence; - To realize semantic features expressing Affect in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence; - To identify lexico-grammatical features expressing Affect in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence; - To compare linguistic features used to realize Affect in news about social violence in English and Vietnamese to clarify similarities and differences in terms of semantic features, discourse features and lexicogrammatical features between English and Vietnamese news on the social violence 1.3 Research questions To achieve the aims and objectives of the study, the research questions are: What discourse features expressing Affect are represented in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence? What semantic features are used in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence? What lexico-grammatical features expressing Affect are represented in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence? What are similarities and differences in linguistic features used to realize Affect in news about social violence in English and Vietnamese? 1.4 Scope of the study The paper mainly focuses on a typical sub-type of Attitude in Appraisal Theory, namely Affect, under detailed consideration of linguistic features including semantic, pragmatic and grammatical features in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence, so phonetic features not fall within the scope of this paper 1.5 Significance of the study By conducting the study, it is expected to make both theoretical and practical contributions Theoretically, the results of the paper will contribute to insight of linguistics studies, basically evaluative language Practically, the findings of the study will answer the question of how to achieve the effectiveness in reporting news, particularly social violence news by using evaluative language means 1.6 Organization of the study This study consists of five chapters as follows: Chapter 1, Introduction, includes the rationale, the aims and objectives, the scope of the study, the research questions, and the structure of the study Chapter 2, Literature review, briefly reviews the literature of previous studies relating to the research topic and presents an overview of news on the social violence, Appraisal Theory and linguistic features of evaluative language Chapter 3, Research Methodology, deals with the research designs, description of samples, the procedure of data collection and data analysis in the study Chapter 4, Findings and Discussions, focus on describing, analyzing frequency, semantic features, discourse features and lexico-grammatical features of Affect in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence and pointing out the similarities and dissimilarities in linguistic features expressing Affect between two languages Chapter 5, Conclusion, summarizes the major findings, draws the conclusions implications, points out the limitations and puts forward some suggestions for further studies CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW This chapter presents the description of the previous studies and the basic theoretical background of the research 2.1 Theoretical background 2.1.1 Appraisal Theory The Appraisal framework was firstly developed and introduced by Martin and White and their colleagues in the 1990s and derived from Halliday‟s theory of SFG It is defined as “an approach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positioning and relationships” according to White (2015b, p 1) Martin and White (2005, p 34) state that Appraisal, along with involvement and negotiation, constitutes “three major discourse semantic resources” explaining interpersonal meaning According to Martin and Rose (2007, p 26), the Appraisal system is used “for negotiating our social relationships, by telling our listeners or readers how we feel about things and people (in a word, what our attitudes are)” In other words, Appraisal system is concerned with linguistic resources used by speakers or writers to express their feeling According to Martin and White (2005, pp 34-35), Appraisal system is composed of three major domains including Attitude, Engagement and Graduation Firstly, the system of Attitude is concerned with our feelings, containing emotional reactions, judgements of human behavior and evaluation of things Secondly, Engagement deals with how much the writer endorses the statements of others The last sub-system, Graduation, attends to cover language resources used to make the message in the text more or less intense An overview of the Appraisal systems is presented as Figure 2.1 ... with the title ? ?The Attitudinal Resources in English and Vietnamese news on the Social Violence? ?? in order to investigate the linguistic features of attitudinal resources used in social violence in. .. examine discourse features expressing Affect in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence; - To realize semantic features expressing Affect in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence; ... features expressing Affect in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence; - To compare linguistic features used to realize Affect in news about social violence in English and Vietnamese to