Every act of evaluation expresses and contributes to a communal value-system, which in turn is a component of the ideology that lies behind every written or spoken text. The expression of stance and appraisal also constructs relations between speaker and hearer (or writer and reader), playing a key role in how discourse is organised. As they give guidance on language usage, Style guides express to some extent the evaluative and otherwise rhetorical strategies chosen by the media as initiators of the communicative situation they are part of. Last year, for instance, the BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombing to avoid labelling the perpetrators as “terrorists”, a word that, according to the BBC guidelines, “can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding”. The study investigates the use, abuse and misuse of these strategies, which sometimes lead to a sort of “semantic acrobatics” resulting in the exasperation rather than the mitigation of value judgments. Particular reference is made to the employment of pragmatic devices such as core vs. non-core vocabulary and tokens of judgement, which, according to the Appraisal Framework (Martin 2000, White 2003), are determined by the system of social attitudes in which the communication takes place and vary from person to person and from time to time. The analysis is carried out on a corpus of fifty journalistic texts covering a time-span of five years (2001-2006) focussing on the way in which Style guides has influenced the expression of stance and of appraisal in the light of crucial events such as 9/11.

Style guides and journalistic voice: Terrorist, suicide-bomber or homicide-bomber?

ATTOLINO, Paola
2007-01-01

Abstract

Every act of evaluation expresses and contributes to a communal value-system, which in turn is a component of the ideology that lies behind every written or spoken text. The expression of stance and appraisal also constructs relations between speaker and hearer (or writer and reader), playing a key role in how discourse is organised. As they give guidance on language usage, Style guides express to some extent the evaluative and otherwise rhetorical strategies chosen by the media as initiators of the communicative situation they are part of. Last year, for instance, the BBC has re-edited some of its coverage of the London Underground and bus bombing to avoid labelling the perpetrators as “terrorists”, a word that, according to the BBC guidelines, “can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding”. The study investigates the use, abuse and misuse of these strategies, which sometimes lead to a sort of “semantic acrobatics” resulting in the exasperation rather than the mitigation of value judgments. Particular reference is made to the employment of pragmatic devices such as core vs. non-core vocabulary and tokens of judgement, which, according to the Appraisal Framework (Martin 2000, White 2003), are determined by the system of social attitudes in which the communication takes place and vary from person to person and from time to time. The analysis is carried out on a corpus of fifty journalistic texts covering a time-span of five years (2001-2006) focussing on the way in which Style guides has influenced the expression of stance and of appraisal in the light of crucial events such as 9/11.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11386/1655179
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