Luận văn thạc sĩ a contrastive study of attitudinal resources in english and vietnamese news report towards plastic straws

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING QUY NHON UNIVERSITY TỐNG MỸ LINH A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF ATTITUDINAL RESOURCES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NEWS REPORTS ON PLASTIC STRAWS Field: Englis

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

QUY NHON UNIVERSITY

TỐNG MỸ LINH

A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF ATTITUDINAL RESOURCES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NEWS REPORTS ON PLASTIC STRAWS

Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201

Supervisor: Assoc.Prof.Dr NGUYỄN THỊ THU HIỀN

BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO

TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC QUY NHƠN

TỐNG MỸ LINH

SO SÁNH ĐỐI CHIẾU NGHĨA THÁI ĐỘ

VỀ ỐNG HÚT NHỰA TRÊN BÁO TIẾNG ANH VÀ TIẾNG VIỆT

Chuyên ngành : Ngôn ngữ Anh

Người hướng dẫn: PGS TS NGUYỄN THỊ THU HIỀN

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP

I certify that this thesis A Contrastive Study of Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese News Reports on Plastic Straws contains no material

extracted or published elsewhere except where reference is made in the study

This thesis has not been submitted for any degree and is not currently being submitted for any other degree or award

Binh Dinh, 2020

Tong My Linh

Additionally, I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to all of my lecturers who play a significant role in nurturing my interest in linguistic research They have provided me with interesting and useful lectures and created favorable conditions for me to enhance my skills and widen my horizon of the knowledge of Linguistics for the past two years

Next, my sincere thanks go to all of my classmates, M.A students of English course 21st at Quy Nhon University, who supported me during the time we took the course together

Last but absolutely not least, from the bottom of my heart, I owe my debt to my family for their unconditional love and tremendous encouragement Without their supports, I could not have overcome all the challenges and obstacles on my academic pathway

ABSTRACT

The thesis applied Appraisal Theory in a contrastive analysis of Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws The data is composed of 20 news reports (10 in English and 10 in Vietnamese) collected from reliable online websites The study aims at discovering the similarities and differences between the two languages

regarding Attitudinal resources, namely Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation The research outcomes indicated that the deployment of the Attitudinal

resources in the English and Vietnamese corpus shared certain similarities such as the occurrence of all types of Attitudinal values and the more

common employment of Positive and Explicit resources than Negative and Implicit ones Despite the aforementioned similarities between the two languages, a number of differences were observed in terms of Affect and Judgment The study hopefully provides the language learners useful knowledge of Appraisal and the features of the evaluative language employed

by English and Vietnamese writers in their news reports

ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS

ABBREVIATIONS

Comp : Appreciation: Composition

EPSNRs : English plastic straws news reports

Prop : Judgment: Propriety

Reac : Appreciation: Reaction

Sat : Affect: Dis/Satisfaction

Sec : Affect: In/Security

Val : Appreciation: Valuation

VPSNRs : Vietnamese plastic straws news reports

CONVENTIONS

Italics are used for quotes, technical terms, emphasis, and examples

Bold is deployed to mark the first use of technical terms

In the numbered examples: Bold marks the use of what is being

demonstrated

TABLE OF CONTENTS

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP i

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iii

ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS vi

LIST OF TABLES ix

LIST OF FIGURES x

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Rationale 1

1.2 Aim and objectives 3

1.2.1 Aim of the study 3

1.2.2 Objectives of the study 3

1.3 Research questions 3

1.4 Scope of the study 4

1.5 Significance of the study 4

1.6 Organization of the study 4

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 6

2.1 Appraisal Theory 6

2.1.1 An overview of Appraisal Theory 6

2.1.2 Engagement 8

2.1.3 Graduation 9

2.1.4 Attitude 9

2.1.4.1 Affect 12

2.1.4.2 Judgment 14

2.1.4.3 Appreciation 17

2.2 Application of Appraisal Theory in discourse analysis 19

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 24

3.1 Research Design 24

3.2 Data Collection 24

3.3 Data Analysis 26

3.4 Research procedures 26

3.5 Reliability and validity in the research 27

CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 28

4.1 The overall usage of the Attitude resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 28 4.2 Affect resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 30

4.2.1 Sub-types of Affect resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 30

4.2.2 Positive and Negative Affect resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 35

4.2.3 Authorial and Non-Authorial Affect resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 37

4.3 Judgement resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 40

4.3.1 Social Esteem and Social Sanction 40

4.3.2 Positive and Negative Judgment resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 45

4.3.3 Explicit and Implicit Judgment resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 46

4.4 Appreciation resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 49

4.4.1 Sub-types of Appreciation resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 49

4.4.2 Positive and Negative Appreciation resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 52

4.4.3 Explicit and Implicit Appreciation resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 54

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS 57

5.1 Conclusions 57

5.2 Implications 60

5.3 Limitations of the study 60

5.4 Suggestions for further research 61

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH 62

REFERENCES 63

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2 1 Grammatical realizations of Affect 13

Table 2 2 The system of Judgment 16

Table 2 3 Categories of Appreciation 18

Table 4 1 Attitude sub-types in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 28

Table 4 2 Authorial and Non-Authorial Affect resources in EPSNRs and

VPSNRs 37

Table 4 3 Sub-types of Judgment resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 42

Table 4 4 Explicit and Implicit Judgment resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 47

Table 4 5 Explicit and Implicit Appreciation resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 54

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2 1 An overview of appraisal resources 8

Figure 2 2 Sub-systems of Attitude 11

Figure 2 3 Judgment and Appreciation as Institutionalized Affect 12

Figure 4 1 Sub-types of Affect resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 31

Figure 4 2 Positive and Negative Affect resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 35

Figure 4 3 Social Esteem and Social Sanction in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 41

Figure 4 4 Positive and Negative Judgement resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 45 Figure 4 5 Sub-types of Appreciation resources in EPSNRs and VPSNRs 50

Figure 4 6 Positive and Negative Appreciation resources in EPSNRs and

VPSNRs 52

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, the researcher begins with presenting all the preliminaries of the thesis It starts with the rationale, followed by the aim and objectives of the study, research questions, the significance of the study and the scope of the study The organization of the study is presented as the last section of the research

1.1 Rationale

It is indisputable that the utilization of plastic straws has become a hot issue lately The small and seemingly harmless utensil that goes generally unnoticed in our everyday life has made it onto 2018‟s most-wanted list If it

is surprising to hear that plastic straws are receiving backlash, it may be even more astonishing to figure out about ninety one percent of the plastic we use

is not recycled and instead ends up in landfills or the ocean It

is estimated that an average person uses 1.6 straws per day, which means around 8.5 billion plastic straws are thrown away each year, potentially contributing to over 150 million tons of plastic in the world‟s oceans Because

of the statistics, some municipalities and corporations are starting to make efforts to fight pollution and control the utilization of plastic straws Additionally, numerous talks, videos, news reports and documentaries have been carried out to partially contribute to eliminating plastic straws and increasing public awareness of the issue However, news reports are considered an effective tool to reflect social issues as well as one of the most popular access for those desiring to expand their horizons Indeed, the success

of any news reports are attributed to not only the degree of the issues‟ influence but also the reporters themselves knowing how to get their outcome across to the viewers

It cannot be denied that the framework of Appraisal Theory, which was

conducted by a group of scholars led by two linguists, namely James Martin and Peter White in the 1980s and 1990s, is considered the theory

in psychology that emotions are extracted from our evaluations (appraisals or estimates) of events that cause specific reactions in different people Essentially, our appraisal of a situation causes an emotional, or affective, response that is going to be based on that appraisal Martin & White (2005) claims that Appraisal Theory framework is a particular approach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate, adopt stances, construct textual personas and manage interpersonal positioning and

relationships Therefore, Appraisal Theory framework is seen as an effective

tool for analyzing attitude expressions and interpersonal meanings in various types of discourse such as literary works, advertisements, talks, news, academic and narrative discourse

There have been some studies carried out, employing the Appraisal Theory as a theoretical framework In respect of English literary works, Liu

(2013) carried out a case study investigating the employment of evaluative language between the high-rated and low-rated English argumentative essays by EFL students in two Chinese universities An attitudinal analysis of the novel Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald was carried out by Hadidi & Mohammadbagheri-Parvin (2015) Xiaolin Liu (2010) tried to apply Appraisal Theory into teaching process in an attempt to get better results for students of English Vo Duy Duc (2011) studied journalistic voices operating in English Vietnamese hard news reports in the light of Appraisal Theory Additionally, Appraisal Theory was also applied to examine the social attitudes in news reports towards an important event Nguyen Thi Thu Hien (2016) carried out researching the social attitudes in news reports towards President Obama‟s visit

to Vietnam As a result, it can be found that Appraisal Theory has been applied

in a wide variety of genres, which proves its significance as a theoretical framework to help understand the evaluative language However, there has not been any contrastive study of attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese news reports towards plastic straws, which means there is a gap available for my thesis It is for those reasons that inspire and prompt me to conduct a research on the attitudinal aspects of the news reports towards plastic straws with the topic:

“A Contrastive Study of Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese News Reports on Plastic Straws.”

1.2 Aim and objectives

1.2.1 Aim of the study

The study primarily aims to investigate Attitudinal resources used in English and Vietnamese news reports towards plastic straws to find out the similarities and differences in the way English and Vietnamese authors show their attitudes on such issue

1.2.2 Objectives of the study

For the aforementioned aim to be fulfilled, the research concentrated on the following objectives:

- To identify the Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws and their occurrence to reveal the choice of language

of evaluation in the reports;

- To discuss the similarities and discrepancies regarding the Attitudinal resource in English and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws

1.3 Research questions

The study addresses itself to answering the two following questions:

1 Which Attitudinal resources are used and how often are they used in English and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws?

2 What are the similarities and differences of the Attitudinal resources in English news reports and those in Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws?

1.4 Scope of the study

Though the Appraisal Theory is composed of three domains, precisely

Attitude, Engagement and Graduation, this study focuses on the Attitudinal

resources, namely Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation due to their

considerable significance in revealing attitudes meeting the aim of the study Additionally, the data source employed in this research is the collection of 10 news reports written by English authors and another 10 written by Vietnamese authors on plastic straws from reliable websites

1.5 Significance of the study

This study is expected to contribute to the research, performance, and interpretation of attitudinal values from the theoretical as well as practical perspectives Regarding theoretical aspect, this study lays a stress on the significant role of Appraisal Theory as an analytical framework which helps

to highlight the language of evaluation Moreover, this study may be a new approach to gain an insight into the features of attitudinal values conveyed by news reports in English and Vietnamese Additionally, it is supposed to provide a reliable reference for the readers who are interested in attitudinal values so that they are likely to have a thorough grasp of the evaluative language Practically, the study is considered to offer specific implications for Vietnamese teachers and learners of English concerning sharpening their English-speaking skills both in classroom contexts and in their daily communication

1.6 Organization of the study

This study consists of five main chapters, as follows:

Chapter 1, Introduction, introduces the rationale, the aim and objectives

of the study, research questions, the scope of the study, the significance of the study and organization of the study

Chapter 2, Literature Review, presents Appraisal Theory including a brief description of its sub-systems consisting of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation, with attention being paid to the Attitudinal aspects Then, a

concise review of the previous studies related to the issues under investigation

is also presented

Chapter 3, Research Methodology, discusses research methods of

research, comprising data collection, data analysis, the reliability and validity

of the research

Chapter 4, Findings and Discussion deals with the analysis and the findings of the study The study analyzes and discusses Attitudinal resources

and the frequency of their occurrence in news reports on plastic straws As a

result, similarities and differences concerning three sub-types of Attitude in

English and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws are revealed and discussed

Chapter 5, Conclusions and Implications, gives out a concise summary

of the research findings, suggests implications for teaching and learning English, and mentions the shortcomings of the research Additionally, suggestions for further studies are also put forward in this chapter

In summary, this chapter serves to provide the preliminaries of the thesis It starts with the rationale, followed by the aim and objectives of the study, research questions, the scope of the study, the significance of the study and organization of the study In other words, Chapter 1 aims at offering an overview of the contents of the following chapters, contributing to sketching the research outline to follow

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter involves a brief overview of the fundamental dimensions functioning as the theoretical framework employed to carry out the study

Specifically, this part of the study is concerned with Attitudinal resources as a system of Appraisal Theory Moreover, this section deals with previous

studies relating to current research

2.1 Appraisal Theory

2.1.1 An overview of Appraisal Theory

Appraisal Theory was put forward by a group of researchers led by Professor James Martin of the Linguistics Department at University of Sydney in the 1900s (Ruo-mei, 2016)

J.R Martin & David Rose (2003) indicate that Appraisal is a system of interpersonal meanings We use the resources of Appraisal for negotiating our

social relationships, by telling our listeners or readers how we feel about things and people

Martin & White (2005) claim that Appraisal Theory is recognized as a

particular approach to evaluate language, adopt stances, construct textual characters, and constitute interpersonal positioning and relationships It probes how speakers/writers pass their attitudes, judgments, or opinions on listeners/readers to form alliances with those who have the same experience and view and distance themselves from those who do not

Martin (2000) once stressed that Appraisal also explores how attitudes,

judgments, and emotional responses from speakers/writers are explicitly

presented or expressed implicitly in texts Appraisal Theory is performed to

analyze the discourse resources to negotiate the social relationships by telling

Appraisal Theory, the evaluative use of language, offers a framework

for assessment of people, things, happenings, places or processes Its main

function is to help “writers/speakers positively or negatively evaluate the entities, happenings and states-of-affairs with which their texts are concerned” (Martin & White, 2005, p 2)

Moreover, Martin & David Rose (2004) state, “Appraisal is a system of interpersonal meaning.” They suggest that the resources of Appraisal are

utilized to arrange our social relationships, by keeping our listeners or readers informed of our sentiments regarding things and people; in other words, our attitudes

Meanwhile, according to Richards & Schmidt (2010, p 30), Appraisal Theory is a developing theory within discourse analysis and conversation

analysis It is concerned with the manners of expressing attitudes such as

certainty, emotional response, social evaluation, and intensity Appraisal can

be realized by lexical items or by the entire clauses

Appraisal Theory can be considered “a framework for investigating the mechanisms language employs in the evaluation and adaptation of stances adopted by discourse producers” (Hadidi & Mohammadbagheri-Parvin, 2015,

p 131)

Martin & White (2005, p 34-35) introduce the outline of Appraisal

framework which is divided into three groups of evaluation resources, namely

Engagement, Gradation and Attitude While Attitude is concerned with our

feelings, including emotional reactions, judgments of behavior and evaluation

of things, Engagement deals with sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse and Graduation attends to grading phenomena

whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred An overview of these appraisal systems is presented in Figure 2.1 below

Figure 2 1 An overview of Appraisal resources

(Source: Martin & White, 2005: 38)

2.1.2 Engagement

According to Martin & White (2005), Engagement is concerned with

the linguistic resources by which speakers/writers adopt a stance towards the value positions being referenced by the text and with respect to those they

address Engagement is composed of two sub-types, namely Monogloss and Heterogloss While Monogloss relates to factual information (single voice), Hetergloss gets involved in multiple voices which consist of Contract and

Regarding Contract, the speaker usually engages his own opinion with other people‟s views; meanwhile, in terms of Expand, the speaker presents

current proposition which is one view among a possible range of views By the same token, it opens space as well as engages more speakers to the

conversation While Contract includes Disclaim (Deny and Counter) and Proclaim (Concur, Pronounce, and Endorse), Expand consists of Entertain

(internal voice of speaker) and Attribute (external sources)

2.1.3 Graduation

Graduation is defined as the one that “attends to grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred” (Martin & White,

2005, p 35) It is divided into two categories, namely Force and Focus

Martin & White (2005) state that Force covers assessments as to degree

of intensity and as to amount It is in the form of Intensification and

Quantification Regarding Intensification, it assesses the degree of intensity

through the scaling of qualities or processes It is realized via Isolating scaling/down-scaling), Infusing or Repetition (Martin and White, 2005)

(up-Force values in most cases are gradable, but it is not in the case of Focus With reference to Focus, it deals with class membership and points out

how strong or weak that membership is (to our mind) Sharpen (up-scale) and Soften (down-scale) are the two elements under Focus

It is irrefutable that a thorough analysis may be obtained by utilizing

Engagement and Graduation to identify sources of evaluation and the degree

of evaluation; however, they do not help much to achieve the aim of this study, so they are not examined

2.1.4 Attitude

Among the three types of Appraisal system, Attitude is considered to be analyzed due to its significance to the study As a result, subtypes of Attitude

work as a framework to uncover evaluative language in English and Vietnamese news reports towards plastic straws Therefore, a detailed

description of Attitudinal resources is presented in the following section

Attitude is one of the three sub-systems of the Appraisal Theory According to Martin & White (2005, p 35), Attitude is concerned with “our feelings, including emotional reaction, judgments of behavior and evaluation

of things” In other words, Attitude is the resource that is applied by the

speakers or writers to express people‟s views, positive and negative feeling reactions with participants and offer the evaluation of things

The Appraisal sub-system of Attitude entails three semantic regions

covering those traditionally considered as emotion, ethics and aesthetics, which are all realized through clusters of grammatical structures especially adjectives

White (2015a, p 2) claims that Attitude refers to the sub-system of

evaluative meaning by which addressees are positioned to adopt a positive or negative view vis-à-vis experiential phenomena or propositions about those phenomena

Attitude is itself classified into three territories of feeling, namely

Affect, Judgment and Appreciation, as presented in the following Figure 2.2

(Liu, 2013, p 42, based on Martin & White, 2005)

Figure 2 2 Sub-systems of Attitude

(Liu, 2013, p 42, based on Martin & White, 2005) Liu (2013) states that there are two important characteristics particular

to the Attitude system deserves bringing up Attitude values can be positive or negative and explicit/inscribed or implicit/invoked For instance, “awesome”

is a kind of positive affect while “frightened” refers to the feeling of insecurity, and therefore coded as negative Under the Appraisal coding

practice, positive and negative values are normally indicated by “+” and “-”

respectively An implicit expression refers to the inscription of Attitude values

not through the use of explicit attitude lexis For example, “She is a beautiful

girl” is an Explicit Judgment, while we cannot easily tell the evaluative meaning encoded in the sentence “He spends 100 pounds per day” In the

latter example, for a thrifty person, it may connote a negative reading of a lavish way of living

Martin & White (2005) claim that one way to think about Judgement and Appreciation is to see them as institutionalized feelings, which take us out

of our everyday common-sense world into the uncommon sense worlds of

shared community values In detail, Judgment refers to feelings in the realm

of proposals about behavior - how we should behave or not while

Appreciation considers feelings as propositions about the value of things - what they are worth or not An outline of this orientation to Affect at the heart

of institutionalized feelings is presented in Figure 2.3

(Martin & White, 2005, p 45)

2.1.4.1 Affect

Affect is one of the three subtypes of Attitude along with Judgment and Appreciation Affect is concerned with emotions involved in “registering positive and negative feelings: do we feel happy or sad, confident or anxious, interested or bored?” (Martin & White, 2005, p 42)

According to Martin & White (2005, p 46), Affect can be realized by

JUDGMENT

APPRECIATION AFFECT

ethics/morality (rules and regulations)

feeling institutionalized as proposals

feeling institutionalized as propositions aesthetics/value (criteria and assessment)

Figure 2 3 Judgment and Appreciation as Institutionalized Affect

quality, mental and behavioral processes, modal adjuncts, and nominalizations These realizations can be viewed in Table 2.1

Table 2 1 Grammatical realizations of Affect

(Martin & White, 2005, p 46)

realizations Examples affect as ‘quality’

-describing participants

- attributed to participants

- manner of processes

Epithet Attribute Circumstance

a sad captain the captain was sad the captain left sadly affect as ‘process’

- desiderative

Modal Adjunct sadly, he had to go

affect as ‘nominalizations’ Subject, Object joy, sadness, sorrow

Martin & White (2005) divide Affect resources into four main sets

which are Un/Happiness, In/Security, Dis/Satisfaction and Dis/Inclination

- Un/Happiness variable covers emotions concerned with “affairs of the heart” - sadness, hate, happiness and love The Un/Happiness set of meanings

involves the moods of feeling happy or sad For example, cry, wail, dislike, hate, miserable, rejoice, love, like, cheerful, and so on

- In/Security variable covers our feelings of peace and anxiety in

relation to our environments, including the people sharing them with us For

instance, restless, anxious, shaking, confident, assure, delegate, proclaim, commit, and so on

- Dis/Satisfaction deals with our feelings of achievement and frustration

in relation to the activities in which we are engaged, including our roles as

both participants and spectators Take the following cases as examples: fidget,

yawn, caution, scold, castigate, attentive, busy, industrious, and so on

- Dis/Inclination is concerned with how the speaker is inclined or disinclined to something; for example, tremble, fearful, wary, shudder, suggest, demand, miss, and so on

Moreover, the Affect value can be classified into Authorial Affect

(author‟s own emotions) and Non-Authorial Affect (the characters‟ emotions

in the text) According to White (2015 b), in terms of Authorial Affect, the

speaker/writer strongly foregrounds his/her subjective presence in the

communicative process In other words, Authorial Affect deals with the

writer/speaker indicating how they have responded emotionally to the people,

things, happenings or situations being evaluated Regarding Non-Authorial Affect, White (2015 b) states that it is the case where it is not the author‟s

emotions which are described but those of other human individuals or groups

As a result, he/she makes use of the second and third person to offer evaluations on others‟ emotions

The following section is devoted to the description of another sub-type

of Affect called Judgment, which is utilized to evaluate people‟s behavior and

actions

2.1.4.2 Judgment

Martin & White (2005, p 42) claim that Judgment deals with attitudes

towards behavior, which we admire or criticize, praise or condemn Phrased

in another way, with Judgment we move into the territory of meaning

construing our attitudes to people and their behavior In other words,

Judgment is concerned with resources for assessing behavior according to various normative principles Moreover, Judgment serves to evaluate human

behavior positively and negatively in terms of that participant‟s acts or dispositions

White (2015 b) states that Judgment may hold a variety of realizations such as Adverbials; for examples, honestly, fairly, cleverly, stupidly, …; Attributes and epithets which can be realized in the following instances: a skillful dancer, he is shy, she is confident, don’t be rude,…; Nominals like a genius, a criminal, a lair, …and Verbs such as lie, cheat, trust, deceive,…)

According to Martin & White (2005), Judgment is divided into two

broad categories, namely Social Esteem and Social Sanction

Social Esteem assesses people‟s conduct from the perspectives of social

ethics and the standard of appropriateness It is a semantic system which

refers to one‟s emotional responses or reactions Social Esteem tends to be

policed in the oral culture, through chat, gossip, jokes and stories of various kinds - with humor often having a critical role to play (Eggins & Slade 1997)

In the opinion of Martin & White (2005), Social Esteem has to handle with

Judgment of Normality (how unusual someone is), Judgment of Capacity (how capable someone is) and Judgment of Tenacity (how resolute someone

is) Meanwhile, Social Sanction is defined by Martin & White (2005) in the

sense that is often codified in writing, as edicts, decrees, rules, regulations and laws about how to behave with penalties and punishments as levers against

those not complying with the code Social Sanction assesses people conduct

based on legal or religious rules It is composed of two kinds, namely

Judgment of Veracity (how truthful someone is) and Judgment of Propriety (how ethical someone is)

Table 2.2 provides a detailed description of the sub-types of the

Judgment with the examples provided

Table 2 2 The system of Judgment

(Source: Martin and White, 2005)

Types of Judgment Positive

[admire]

Negative [criticize]

SOCIAL

ESTEEM

NORMALITY (how special?)

- lucky, natural, odd, cool,…

- normal, natural, familiar,…

- cool, stable, predictable,

- erratic, unpredictable,…

- dated, daggy, retrograde,…

CAPACITY (how capable?)

- powerful, robust, vigorous,…

- sound, healthy, fit, …

- adult, mature, experienced, …

- witty, humorous, droll,

…

- balanced, together, sane, …

- mild, weak, whimpy,…

- unsound, sick, cripped,

…

- immature, childish, helpless, …

- dull, dreary, grave, …

- slow, stupid, thick, …

TENACITY (how dependable?)

- plucky, brave, heroic,

…

- cautious, wary, patient,

…

- careful, thorough, meticulous,…

- tireless, persevering, resolute, …

- timid, cowardly, gutless,

…

- rash, impatient, impetuous,…

- hasty, capricious, reckless, …

- weak, distracted, despondent,…

Positive [praise]

Negative [condemn]

SOCIAL

SANCTION

VERACITY (how honest?)

- truthful, honest, credible, …

- frank, candid, direct, …

- discrete, tactful, …

- dishonest, deceitful, lying,…

- blunt, blabbermouth, …

Types of Judgment Positive

[admire]

Negative [criticize]

PROPRIETY (how far beyond reproach?)

- good, moral, ethical, …

- law abiding, fair, just,

…

- sensitive, kind, caring,

…

- unassuming, modest, humble, …

- polite, respectful, reverent, …

- bad, immoral, evil, …

- corrupt, unfair, unjust,

…

- insensitive, mean, cruel,

…

- rude, discourteous, irreverent, …

- selfish, greedy, avaricious, …

The next section involves the illustration of the last type of Attitude - Appreciation, which is used to evaluate semiotic and natural phenomena,

according to the ways in which they are valued or not in a certain field

2.1.4.3 Appreciation

Martin and White (2005, p 36) state that Appreciation looks at

resources for construing the value of things, including natural phenomena and semiosis (as either product or process) Vo Duy Duc (2011, p 31) also gives

the definitions for the term He claims that Appreciation is not always

concerned with the evaluation of things, but in many instances, it deals with

the aesthetic evaluation of humans Appreciation is defined as “the assessment of artifacts, entities, happenings, and states of affairs by reference

to aesthetics and other systems of social valuation” (White, 2015 a, p 2)

Martin & White (2005) affirms Appreciation is composed of three

sub-types: Reaction (emotional impact of something on the reader or listener), Composition (the texture of something) and Valuation (social value of

something) Table 2.3 gives a deep insight into the categories of Appreciation

along with examples

Table 2 3 Categories of Appreciation Types of Appreciation Positive Negative

REACTION

IMPACT

- arresting, captivating,

engaging,…

- fascinating, exciting, moving, …

- lively, dramatic, intense, …

- dull, boring, tedious,

…

- dry, ascetic, uninviting,

…

- flat, predictable, monotonous, …

QUALITY

- lovely, beautiful, splendid, …

- fine, good, …

- attractive, appealing, welcome,

…

- symmetrical, proportional,…

- consistent, considered, logical,

…

- unbalanced, discordant, irregular, …

- uneven, flawed, …

- contradictory, disorganized, …

COMPLEXITY

- simple, pure, elegant, …

- lucid, clear, precise, …

VALUATION

SIGNIFICANCE

- significant, deep, lasting, essential, unique, innovative,

…

- fake, conservative, forgettable,

unmemorable, bogus, …

BENEFIT/HARM

- valuable, beneficial, useful, helpful, …

- worthless, useless, helpless, ineffective, …

It can be seen that Reaction deals with emotional impact on the readers

or listeners and consists of two sub-types, namely Impact and Quality

Impact involves the evaluated entity (whether the object grabs our attention); meanwhile, Quality is centered on the evaluator‟s response (whether we like the object) In addition, Composition, which is related to our perception, is

utilized to evaluate a product or process about its configuration According to

Martin & White (2005), Composition is classified into two smaller resources

which are Balance (whether the phenomenon hang together) and Complexity

(whether it is hard to follow the phenomena or not) Regarding Valuation,

Ngo & Unsworth (2015) categorize it into two sub-types, namely

Significance (whether the phenomena is important) and Benefit (whether the

phenomena is beneficial)

The next parts deal with the other resources of Appraisal, namely

Engagement and Graduation However, they are considered as secondary

points due to their insignificance to the thesis; as a result, a brief description

of the aspects is presented

2.2 Application of Appraisal Theory in discourse analysis

In the light of Appraisal Theory, a productive theoretical framework, a

lot of scientific investigations have been conducted in different discourses like English literary works, news discourse, academic and narrative discourse

By drawing Appraisal Theory as an analytical framework, Painter

(2003) tracked the development of two children‟s resources for expressing emotional, moral and other evaluations, examined the interplay of implicit (evoked) and explicit (inscribed) attitudinal construal in mother-child talk,

and explores the role of Attitude in language development generally It was concluded that expressions of Affect are „gradable‟ even in their pre-lexical forms and that the differentiation of Affect into the „institutionalized‟ forms of

Judgment and Appreciation may involve semiotic moves that encourage

reflective awareness of the meaning system itself

Xiaolin Liu (2010) attempted to apply the Appraisal Theory to the

analysis and teaching of college English reading, with the hope of finding a new way of teaching college English reading, which will be helpful to solve the problems in the process of teaching English reading in China The results

of the study indicate that the application of Appraisal Theory to the teaching

of college English reading is immensely helpful for students in their reading

comprehension With the help of Appraisal analysis, students can have a

better understanding of the reading materials And this indicates that the

Appraisal Theory can be used as an important strategy to develop their critical ability Appraisal Theory can provide the Chinese English teachers with a

new perspective to teach reading in English

Another significant study is that Xinghua Liu & Thompson (2009) contrasted Attitude choices of a Chinese undergraduate writing an English and a Chinese essay In this study, the Chinese text was found to have fewer affect and judgment items to avoid direct ethical or moral evaluations and disclosure of personal emotions for either face-saving or self-protection, which, as the researchers suggested, reflected a Chinese practice of language and rhetoric to achieve social harmony

Xinghua Liu (2013) continued to contribute to the Appraisal Theory‟s

research by carrying out a case study that investigated the use of evaluative language between the high- and low-rated English argumentative essays by two Chinese university EFL students The study found that the high-rated essay successfully employed appraisal values to foreground authorial voice and position readers The study suggests that more attention should be given

to the teaching of EFL/ESL writing from an interpersonal perspective and

proposes the necessity of explaining EFL/ESL students‟ use of evaluative language from both linguistic and socio-cultural perspectives

An Attitudinal analysis of the novel Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

was carried out by Hadidi & Mohammadbagheri-Parvin (2015) The whole novel was analyzed discursively, linguistically, and stylistically through one

of the subsystems of Appraisal, namely Attitude It was found that Attitudinal resources were distributed in the expected order of Appreciation, Judgment, Affect, and that Attitude was stylistically indicative of and worked in line with

character and context within the novel in question

In line with that study, Pascual & Unger (2010) conducted a research

about Appraisal in research genres The findings of the study showed that most proposals are highly Heteroglossic, and the Engagement resources are

mainly employed which suggests that the authors tend to invite rather than challenge their colleagues' views This may be interpreted as an attempt to address a potentially varied audience

Li (2016) applied the Appraisal Theory as a framework to analyze

several English song discourses Through analysis of characteristics of the

division of Attitudinal resources in the English discourse it aims to find

language feature in the English song discourse with the aim of helping readers understand the emotion expressed by the author and how significant the attitude meaning was in building interpersonal relations between the author and readers

In terms of business English, Vo Duy Duc (2011) compared and contrasted the stylistic, structural and ideological properties of English and Vietnamese business news reporting by applying the framework of the

Appraisal Theory developed by Martin and White (2005) as an analytical tool

The study dealt with investigating whether the business hard news reporting

of the two languages shared the same system of voices or not The findings of the study showed that the English and Vietnamese business texts generally experienced the similar structure – and that these news stories basically operated with the same reporter voice However, the two languages reflected considerable differences in the representation of the key social groups in terms of the ideologies embedded in the two languages

Additionally, Appraisal Theory was also applied to examine the social

attitudes in news reports towards an important event Nguyen Thi Thu Hien (2016) carried out a research to uncover the social attitudes in news reports towards President Obama‟s visit to Vietnam The research claimed that

Appraisal Theory could be applied as a potent tool for Vietnamese language

discourse analysis to reveal numerous aspects of sentiment comprising the appraisers, appraisal‟s objects, the prejudice of the appraisers and of the writers The results show that the appraisers expressed their attitudes about five objects of appraisal differently Most of the viewpoints showed positive feelings, emotions or judgments In addition, the appraisers tend to express their own emotions and evaluate Obama‟s visit- related entities instead of the people‟s behavior The findings also showed that the appraisers were prone to

a safe stance either by avoiding expressing their opinions

Numerous masters‟ theses were conducted to investigate the Attitudinal resources in the light of the Appraisal Theory There were a wide variety of

discourses employed, ranging from English advertising slogans (Nguyen Thi Minh Ngan (2017)), judges‟ comments (Nguyen Thanh Tri (2018), Le Huu Loc, (2019)), English advertisements of product (Pham Thi Thuy Ngoc (2017)), love song lyrics (Nguyen Thi Ngan (2018)) to film reviews (Vo Thuy Trieu (2019), Phan Thi Thanh Hoa (2017))

From the previous studies, it can be seen that there has been a wide

variety of research carried out by applying Appraisal Theory However, the utilization of Appraisal Theory as a tool to shed light on Attitudinal resources

in English and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws is not common The current study makes use of news reports to uncover a specific kind of evaluative language

In summary, Chapter 2 presents an overview of the Appraisal Theory

as the guiding theoretical framework for the study Three groups of evaluation

resources, namely Engagement, Attitude and Gradation are discussed However, since the research concentrates on appraisers‟ attitude, only Attitude

was analyzed in this study A detailed description of the three sub-types:

Affect, Judgment and Appreciation is also provided Moreover, a brief review

of the previous studies applying Appraisal Theory is presented to point out the

gap for research

CHAPTER 3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3.1 Research Design

This study was carried out with the combination of both qualitative and quantitative approaches The qualitative approach was employed to analyze and describe the attitudinal resources via news reports in English as well as Vietnamese After that, the quantitative approach helped investigate the

frequency of occurrence of Affect, Judgment, Appreciation and their sub-types

in the reports The quantitative analysis played an important role in casting light on the question of how frequently the attitudinal resources were dicovered

Additionally, the analytic and synthetic techniques were utilized harmoniously for the scrutinization process The analytic practice assisted in pinpointing and separating certain aspects to concentrate The synthetic practice was applied to consider the interdependence of these elemental parts

With the aim of reaching the target of the study, it was impossible to put a single method in use As a result, apart from the aforementioned approaches, descriptive, inductive, comparative and contrast methods were also applied The descriptive method came to the aid of giving a precise

description in terms of Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation Then, inductive

method proved helpful in synthesizing the outcome and drew a conclusion Comparative and contrast techniques assisted in the similarities and

discrepancies regarding the Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese

news reports on plastic straws

3.2 Data Collection

collected from online national newspapers such as Thanhnien, Tuoitre, Vietnamnet, TuanVietnam, and Vnexpress as well as online international newspapers like Nationalgeographic, Theguardian, Globalnews, and Reuters The length of the reports fluctuated from 799 words to 1815 words and the news reports served the analysis of the evaluative language The reports met some standards of lexical meaning and grammatical structures

English news reports on plastic straws were listed as follows

1

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/banning-plastic-straws-will-not-be enough-fight-clean-oceans

2 california-people-with-disabilities

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/aug/25/plastic-straw-ban-3 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jul/19/trump-plastic-straws

4 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/style/plastic-straw-alternatives

5 https://www.nps.gov/articles/straw-free

6 out-plastic-straws-as-opposition-to-them-grows

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-starbucks-straws/starbucks-to-phase-7.https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/22/opinions/plastic-straws-ban-opinion

8 fish-now-there-s-growing

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/plastic-straws-clog-ocean-hurt-9 but-they-are-part-of-a-huge-problem

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/plastic-straws-are-little-10 straws-and-bags-no-more-canada-aims-to-clean-up-its-act

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-canada-plastics/plastic-The following websites were about Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws

1 phong-trao

https://vnexpress.net/khong-dung-ly-ong-hut-nhua-y-nghia-hay-chay-theo-2 nhung-co-thuc-su-vi-moi-truong

https://phapluat.tuoitrethudo.com.vn/ong-hut-giay-tot-hon-ong-hut-nhua-3 ban-nghi

https://tuoitre.vn/ong-hut-co-tui-giay-co-bao-ve-moi-truong-nhieu-nhu-4 https://tuoitre.vn/31-quan-ca-phe-o-da-nang-noi-khong-voi-do-nhua

5 that-su-cua-hanh-tinh-nay

http://khampha.vn/khoa-hoc-cong-nghe/ong-hut-nhua-co-phai-la-ke-thu-6 bua-sang-khuyen-khich-thoi-quen-tieu-dung-xanh

The system of Attitude in Appraisal Theory was applied as the

theoretical framework for the procedures of data analysis The collected data were encoded manually from E1 to E321 concerning English news reports

and from V1 to V317 regarding Vietnamese news reports The Attitudinal resources (Affect, Judgment, Appreciation and their sub-categories) were

analyzed and classified in the twenty news reports Additionally, quantitative methods were utilized to uncover the frequency of their occurrence and disclose the choice of language of evaluation in the reports, thereby

identifying the similarities and differences of Attitudinal resources in EPSNRs

and VPSNRs

3.4 Research procedures

There were specific steps followed by the author, presented as follows: