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

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 an

LÊ YẾN NHI

THE ATTITUDINAL RESOURCES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NEWS ON THE SOCIAL VIOLENCE

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: 8 22 02 01

Người hướng dẫn: PGS.TS Trần Văn Phước

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

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP I ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS II ABSTRACT III TABLE OF CONTENTS IV ABBREVIATIONS VII LIST OF TABLES VIII LIST OF FIGURES X

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1.1 Rationale 1

1.2 Aims and objectives of the study 2

1.2.1 Aims of the study 2

1.2.2 Objectives of the study 2

1.3 Research questions 2

1.4 Scope of the study 3

1.5 Significance of the study 3

1.6 Organization of the study 3

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 5

2.1 Theoretical background 5

2.1.1 Appraisal Theory 5

2.1.2 Affect 6

2.1.3 Linguistic features of Affect 7

2.1.3.1 Semantic features 7

2.1.3.2 Discourse features 9

2.1.3.3 Lexico-grammatical features 12

2.2 Overview of Social Violence 15

2.2.1 Definition of Social Violence 15

2.2.2 Forms of Social Violence 15

2.3 Previous studies 16

2.4 Summary 18

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 19

3.1 Research methods 19

3.1.1 Data collection 19

3.1.1.1 Sources 19

3.1.1.2 Sampling 20

3.1.1.3 Data collection and coding procedure 20

3.2 Data analysis 21

CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS 22

4.1 Linguistic features of Affect in English news on social violence (ENOSV) 22

4.1.1 Semantic features in ENOSV 22

4.1.2 Discourse features in ENOSV 25

4.1.2.1 Positive and Negative Affect resources 25

4.1.2.2 Explicitness and Implicitness 27

4.1.3 Lexico-grammatical features in ENOSV 29

4.1.3.1 Words 30

4.1.3.2 Groups 32

4.2 Linguistic features of Affect in Vietnamese news on social violence (VNOSV) 33

4.2.1 Semantic features in VNOSV 33

4.2.2 Discourse features in VNOSV 36

4.2.2.1 Positive and Negative Affect resources 36

4.2.2.2 Explicitness and Implicitness 38

4.2.3 Lexico-grammatical features in VNOSV 40

4.2.3.1 Words 41

4.2.3.2 Groups 42

4.3 Similarities and differences in linguistic features expressing Affect in ENOSV versus VNOSV 44

4.3.1 Semantic features 46

4.3.2 Discourse features 47

4.3.3 Lexico-grammatical features 48

4.4 Summary 49

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 50

5.1 Conclusion 50

5.2 Implications 54

5.3 Limitations and Suggestions for Further Study 54

REFERENCES I APPENDICES V APPENDIX A – LINKS OF THE VIETNAMESE NEWS v

APPENDIX B – LINKS OF THE ENGLISH NEWS vi

APPENDIX C – SAMPLE ENGLISH NEWSPAPER ANALYSIS vii

APPENDIX D – SAMPLE VIETNAMESE NEWSPAPER ANALYSIS xii

LIST OF TABLES

Table

Page Number

2.1 Grammatical realizations of Affect (Martin & White,

2.2 The system of Affect (Marti & White, 2005, pp

3.2 List of Vietnamese electronic newspapers 19

4.2 Positive and Negative Affect resources in ENOSV 25 4.3 Explicitness and Implicitness in ENOSV 27

4.4 Three factors of Lexico-grammatical features in

4.5 The distribution of each word class as

Lexico-grammatical features expressing Affect in ENOSV 30

4.6 The distribution of each word group as

Lexico-grammatical features expressing Affect in ENOSV 32

4.8 Positive and Negative Affect resources in VNOSV 36 4.9 Explicitness and Implicitness in VNOSV 38

4.10 Three factors of Lexico-grammatical features in

4.11 The distribution of each word class as

Lexico-grammatical features expressing Affect in VNOSV 41

4.12 The distribution of each group as Lexico-grammatical

4.13 The Distribution of the Linguistic Features Expressing

Affect in English Newspapers and Vietnamese ones 45

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure

Page Number

2.1 An overview of Appraisal resources (Martin & White,

2.2

The first stage modifications to the Affect system (Ngo

& Unsworth, 2015, p 12 – based on Martin & White,

2005)

8

4.1 Positive and Negative Affect resources in ENOSV 25

4.3 Three factors of Lexico-grammatical features in ENOSV 29 4.4 Positive and Negative Affectual resources in VNOSV 36

4.6 Three factors of Lexico-grammatical features in VNOSV 40

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 lexico-grammatical features between English and Vietnamese news on the social violence

and Vietnamese news on the social violence?

2 What semantic features are used in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence?

3 What lexico-grammatical features expressing Affect are represented

in English and Vietnamese news on the social violence?

4 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 do 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

Figure 2.1 An overview of Appraisal resources (Martin & White, 2005, p 38)

In short, the Appraisal framework aims to describe the various ways of linguistic realization of interpersonal meanings in language use Each sub-system of AT contains its own sub-systems for describing the speakers or writers‟ opinions Affect, a central element of Attitude, will be demonstrated

in detail in the next section because it is the main framework for this study

2.1.2 Affect

Affect refers to the evaluation by which the writers or speakers indicate

how they are emotionally disposed to the person, thing, happening or state of affairs To put it simply, Affect expresses various shades of human‟s emotions including positive and negative feelings According to Martin and White (2005), Affect can be classified into Authorial and Non-authorial stance (Observe Affect) The former deals with the writer‟s emotions, while the latter belongs to sources of emotions of other human individuals or groups The below example is a clear illustration for this feature

Marshall remains very angry [Non-Auth] with me and I still don‟t know why I love [Auth] him so much that if he asked me to jump in front of a train for him, I

according to Halliday (1994) and being reviewed by Martin and White (2005) Table below introduces grammatical realization of Affect

Table 2.1 Grammatical realizations of Affect (Martin & White, 2005, p 46)

a sad captain the captain was sad the captain left sadly

Affect as „comment‟

Affect as

„nominalisations‟ Subject, Object… fear, joy, sadness, grief, etc

In addition, according to Martin and White (2005), Affect is distinguished whether Affect value is positive or negative to express not only the writer‟s feelings but also the souls of those within the text Therefore, a division of four evaluative meanings of Affect based on this orientation is Dis/Inclination, Un/Happiness, In/Security and Dis/Satisfaction Besides, Affect can be expressed in discourse directly, explicitly or indirectly, implicitly basing on Martin and Rose (2003) and Martin and White (2005)

2.1.3 Linguistic features of Affect

Three aspects of language in text used to analyze linguistic feature of Affect will be presented in more detail as follow

2.1.3.1 Semantic features

According to Martin and Rose (2003), Martin and White (2005), Martin and Rose (2007a), Bednarek (2008) and Ngo and Unsworth (2015), the Affect system is presented in Figure 2.2

Figure 2.2 The first stage modifications to the Affect system

(Ngo & Unsworth, 2015, p 12 – based on Martin & White, 2005)

According to Martin and White (2005, pp 48-49), the Affect system divided into four sub-types: Dis/Inclination, Un/Happiness, In/Security and Dis/Satisfaction These four sub-types are defined as follow:

Un/Happiness indicates the moods of feeling of the speaker whether

he is sad or happy It deals with emotions concerned with “affairs of the heart” – sadness, hate, happiness, love…

In/Security deals with the feelings of peace and anxiety in relation to

our “environs”, including the people sharing them with us This sub-type covers emotions concerned with ecosocial well-being – anxiety, fear, confidence and trust

Dis/Satisfaction covers the speaker‟s feelings of achievement and

DIS/INCLINATION

NON-DESIRE DESIRE

frustration in relation to the activities This covers emotions concerned with telos (the pursuit of goal) – ennui, displeasure, curiosity, respect

Dis/Inclination reflexes emotions related to intention rather than

reaction, regarding a stimulus that is irrealis

Table 2.1 summarizes all four sub-categories of Affectual value with their examples basing on Martin and White (2005) and being refined by Ngo and Unsworth (2015)

Table 2.2 The system of Affect

(Marti & White, 2005, pp 48-51) and (Ngo & Unsworth, 2015)

UN/HAPPINESS - cheer – laugh, cheerful,…

- Affection – hug, love,…

- misery – cry, sad,…

a Positive and Negative Affect

According to Martin and Rose (2003, pp 25-35), in a common sense, positive Affect concerning with positive sentiments is realized through such words as satisfied, wish, loved, whereas negative Affect dealing with negative

sentiments is realized through such words as fear, pain, anxiety, heartache, torn to pieces In this regard, Halliday and Matthiessen (2014, pp 22-24) state that language reflects polarity This means that clauses are positive or negative Two contrary aspect of clauses play an important role to distinguish positive Affect and negative Affect Positive Affect is usually obvious in affirmative clauses while negative Affect appears when clauses express negative meaning Halliday and Matthiessen (2014, p 23) refined that

negative polarity of a clause can be divided into generalized one (e.g., they

didn‟t know) and specialized one (e.g., they never knew or nobody knew)

Specifically, the negative polarity of a clause is generalized when this clause contains the adverb “not” in a verbal group The negative polarity of a clause

is specialized when this clause is formed by nominal group function and clause function For example, the negative meaning of the clause could

realized by Deictic in participation (e.g., none, no + Noun, neither + Noun),

by Deictic in circumstance (e.g., at no time, under no circumstance, for no

reason, in no way), by Thing in participation (e.g., no one, nobody, nothing),

or by Thing in circumstance (e.g., never, nowhere, nowise, seldom) In other

words, in respect of negative polarity, we can determine the negative meaning

of clause through the adjective “no”, the adverb “not” and other forms expressing negative meaning such as “never”, “hardly”, “neither”

b Explicit and Implicit Affect

White (2001) pointed out that there is a crucial distinction between explicit and implicit attitude, depending on the way that attitude is conveyed whether directly or indirectly Similarly, Bednarek (2009) told the difference between explicit and implicit Affect under different names including overt and covert Affect respectively In spite of being called by dissimilar names, these two sides indicate the explicitness of a clause in general and explicitness

of Affect in particular For the purpose of easily following this study, the

terms “explicit” and “implicit” were chosen to survey and analyze data

The examination of explicit and implicit Affect are done in all levels of language such words, clauses, sentences Specifically, the realization of explicit Affect are discourses whose attitudinal assessments are displayed through some kinds of directly evaluative lexis, typically adjectives (Martin & Rose, 2003) Implicit Affect, on the other hand, can be expressed through the selection of ideational meanings, lexical metaphors and non-core vocabulary items

From the perspective of ideational meanings, Affect is realized indirectly through obvious processes which are discussed in detail in next section Besides, Affect is also demonstrated by participants and circumstances According to Martin and White (2005, p 62), Affect mostly involves individual and social subjectivity through specific elements counting gender, generation, class, ethnicity and in/capacity

From the perspective of lexical metaphors, Rose (1996, p 81)

demonstrated Affect through the groups “fighting mad” and “tears were

falling down” in a part of anthem for the Stolen Generations:

One dark day on Framingham

Came and didn‟t give a damn

My mother cried go get their dad

He came running fighting mad

Mother‟s tears were falling down

The groups “fighting mad” and “tears were falling down” implies that

the father is angry and the mother is sad, which indicates a sub-type of Affect named unhappiness

In short, it is difficult to identify implicit Affects in discourses if we do not rely on context because they are influenced by many factors

2.1.3.3 Lexico-grammatical features

a Word and word classes

Lexical resources in generally and word classes in particular are often used to express Affect It is the fact that all types of word class are able to transfer the speaker‟s emotion, for example, nouns (fear/ joy), verbs (to love/

to hate), adjectives (sad/ happy) and adverbs (anxiously/ incredibly)

Besides, Affect can also be realized through word formation as part of grammatical metaphors Thus, if any elements of the original figure are Affective words, the new figure as a product of metaphor is able to express Affect as well, for example:

I love you (love is a verb) (1)

My love is for you (love is a noun) (2)

It is clear that the sentence (2) implies the Affective meaning expressed

by the sentence (1)

b Word groups

Evaluative language is able to be shown through complete groups counting nominal, verbal, adjectival and adverbial group (Labov (1972), Martin & White, (2007)) Follow the part below for a more detailed description

Nominal group

A nominal group consists of three ingredients, labeled head, qualifier and premodifier which could be deictic, numerative, epithet and classifier as

in following example

Those five beautiful shiny Jonathan apples sitting on the chair

Deictic Numerative Interpersonal

Epithet

Experiential Epithet Classifier Thing Premodifier Head Qualifier

Interpersonal epithet and experiential epithet are two categories, but they modify a noun in different ways Thanks to experiential epithets, the quality of the head could be depicted in an indirect way to reflect the objective property of things, while interpersonal epithets express the speaker‟s subjective attitude clearly (Poynton, 1996) Therefore, all kinds of epithet in nominal groups could express Affect in certain circumstances However, the head can be as an epithet Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) pointed out that

This is a more restricted type in which the Head is almost always an attitudinal noun embodying some positive or more usually negative appraisal This appraisal may be extended prosodically by adjectives modifying the attitudinal noun (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014, p 393)

Verbal group

Verbal groups are referred through processes in Transitivity system, however, the structure of the finite verb groups is presented because finite element is the key to express Affect The finite verb group consists of event (verb process), finite and auxiliary (optional element), for example:

couldn‟t have been going to be being eaten

Finite Auxiliary 1 Auxiliary 2 Auxiliary 3 Auxiliary 4 Auxiliary 5 Event

(adapted from Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014, p 397)

Adjectival group

As stated by Martin and White (2005, p 58), “the canonical

grammatical realization for attitude is adjectival”, so it is true for Affect

“Adjectival” refers to both adjectives and adjectival groups Adjectival group, consisting of adjectives as head and one or more adverbs as modifiers, can indicate Affect in the same way as adjectives, for example:

In the example, the nominal group “the Son Doong cave‟s beauty” serving as a complement indicates a positive appraisal on the location, so the whole prepositional group expresses Affect because of the cohesiveness of the preposition and its complement

Therefore, the clause is not only a physical combination of all components with various words classes and word groups, it can also be

considered as the overall combination in meaning Clearly, the meaning of the whole clause is grammatically built up, linking the meaning of its components Thus, all of components gather and cooperate to express evaluative meaning and the clause will be able to express evaluative meaning

Due to limited resources, this paper mainly focuses on words or word classes and word groups

2.2 Overview of Social Violence

2.2.1 Definition of Social Violence

The term “societal violence” (also social violence) is used by Otmar

(2014, p 9) to refer to “an abusive behavior that is based on the denial of

others, and is practiced through physical and verbal abuse, assault, and transgression against the law, in order to achieve illegal personal benefits”

In other words, Kelly (2014) noted that societal violence is combination of

community and social violence ranging from an “interpersonal act of violence

between two people on the playground to a mass shooting by one person” In

simple terms, social violence indicates to any type of violence committed by individuals or the community that has a negative social impact

2.2.2 Forms of Social Violence

According to The World Health Organization (WHO, 2002), social violence is one of specific cases of collective violence which constitutes three main categories of violence, accompanied with self-directed violence and interpersonal violence There are different forms of social violence such as

“armed conflicts, gang violence, parent-to-child physical aggression,

terrorism, forced displacement and segregation”

(http://www.child-encyclopedia.com) These forms of social violence have negatively affected families, local communities, and society as a whole both mental and physical

health

2.3 Previous studies

The Appraisal Theory (AT), which was introduced and developed primarily by Martin and White (2005) and his colleagues and derived from Halliday‟s theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics, has been closely investigated by many researchers and commonly used to analyze evaluative language in different genres in English and other languages

Xinghua and Thompson (2009) investigated the use of evaluative language in one Chinese EFL student‟s argumentative writing in both English and Chinese in view of AT The reasons for differences or similarities in the distribution of attitudinal values in the student‟s English and Chinese essays might be due to the student‟s level of language proficiency and the dissimilarity in phrasing

Related to the use of evaluation in the news, Bednarek (2010) conducted a study for analyzing evaluative language in journalism Her study pointed out evaluation in newspaper language played an important role in

journalistic practices because a great number of „evaluative parameters‟ referring to the „standards, norms, and values‟ could be achieved through

using evaluative language Twelve main evaluative parameters were classified by Bednarek (2006a) basing on the extensive textual analysis of hard news stories in order to increase news values or newsworthiness

Duc (2011) successfully defended his doctoral thesis which compared journalistic voices operating in English and Vietnamese business hard news reporting in the light of AT

From a linguistic perspective, Tilakaratna and Mahboob (2013) examined the use of explicit and inexplicit evaluative language within a Sri Lankan political discussion in English in the light of the Appraisal

framework The finding showed that considerable resources of attitudinal language used in participants‟ discussion reflected their view on controversial issues and how the participants connected with the audience by using these resources

Auman (2014) focused differences between UK, Belgian and French press articles with regard to the appraisal theory There was a considerable difference in frequent using expressions of three types of Attitude in all three national presses though the evaluative expressions are predominantly positive

One of studies related to this field was done by Ngo and Unsworth (2015) Their study drew attention to additional refinements of evaluative resources in spoken discourse by students in English and Vietnamese within small group discussions about topics related to everyday lives These refinements contributed to the ongoing development of the Appraisal framework and played an essential role for students whose English is not their mother tongue for enhancing the effectiveness of expressions of their evaluative stance

Recently, there was also many research studies carried out focusing on the system of Attitude to investigate the use of Affect resources Phuoc (2019) examined Vietnamese writers‟ choices of Affect in some Vietnamese short stories to gain an insight into main characters‟ feelings and emotions and discussed some similarities and differences in choosing domains and means

by each writer or each group of writers In this same year, he also conducted the article exploring Vietnamese high school students‟ capacity in writing English evaluative paragraphs His research study aimed to increase researches on non-native student writing and establish a foundation for building up the skill of evaluative writing for Vietnamese university-level students of English

Ngoan and Loc (2019) paid attention to the use of Affect resources in the expressive acts by the judges of the two reality show and the similarities and differences in terms of their frequency, realization strategies and polarities used by two groups of those

Also, in Vietnam, there have been many M.A theses been conducted to investigate the use of evaluative language in view of AT For example, Hien (2014) performed a comparative study to observe interpersonal meaning in hotel brochures written in English and Vietnamese Findings from this thesis revealed that both English and Vietnamese shared a great similarity in using attitudinal language in hotel brochures Besides, Ngoc (2017) analyzed the use of Appraisal in advertisements Her results helped language learners understand the linguistic features expressing Affect in English advertisements

of products Nguyen (2017) surveyed the social attitudes in news reports on events The paper revealed that appraisers were likely to express their emotion and evaluate the events and things more than judge readers‟ behavior She confirmed that the commentators used a variety of attitudinal resources to show their negative comment toward these events in another study

In general, until now there was no research on using Affect in social violence news in English and Vietnamese

CHAPTER 3: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This chapter, the research methods applied to answer the research questions are described in details The data collection and data analysis are also presented

04 official electronic newspaper websites as follows:

Table 3.1 List of English electronic newspapers

articles

The Times of Northwest

Indiana

The Washington Post www.washingtonpost.com 01

For Vietnamese data, the 06 articles about the social violence were downloaded from 04 Vietnamese official electronic newspaper websites as follows:

Table 3.2 List of Vietnamese electronic newspapers

articles

The Cong An Nhan Dan www.cand.com.vn 01

The Gia Dinh & Xa Hoi www.giadinh.net.vn 01

Besides, these EVNs must meet some main criteria such as:

(1) All articles are written texts

(2) The average length of each articles ranges from 500 to 1000 words and are published from 2017 to 2019

(3) All articles are collected from the official electronic newspapers written in Vietnamese or in English and have the same content of violent behaviours taken place at home or at school or in public place

3.1.1.2 Sampling

In 12 English and Vietnamese articles about social violence, 475 samples expressing Affect based on the framework of Appraisal Theory by Martin and White (2005) were collected These samples were separated and classified according to four semantic features expressing Affect (including Un/happiness, Dis/satisfaction, In/security, Dis/inclination), two discourse features expressing Affect (including positive/negative, explicit/implicit) and three lexico-grammatical features expressing Affect (including clauses, word groups, word classes)

3.1.1.3 Data collection and coding procedure

The procedure for data collection and coding was carried out with many steps as follows:

Step 1: EVNs were downloaded from official electronic newspaper websites

Step 2: After having read through all articles, the researcher separated and classified Affect resources and their lexico-grammatical features (words,

groups and clauses)

Step 3: Four sub-types of Affect (including Un/happiness, Dis/satisfaction, In/security, Dis/inclination) were identified and then described according to discourse features (including positive and negative, explicit and implicit orientations)

Step 4: Four sub-types of Affect were highlighted using four different colors (the green for Un/Happiness, the red for Dis/Satisfaction, the yellow for In/Security, the pink for Dis/inclination)

Step 5: Data of the text were coded and illustrated in square brackets, for example, [E1.01.01] shows that it is the first instance expressing Affect in the first clause in the first English newspaper, while [V1.01.02] indicates that

it is the second instance expressing Affect in the first clause in the first Vietnamese newspaper

3.2 Data analysis

The theoretical framework of sub-system of Affect in Appraisal theory was applied to analyze the data All Affect resources in EVNs were described qualitatively regarding semantic features expressing Affect, discourse features and lexico-grammatical features as well as clarified quantitatively to know how frequently they occurred in the two languages Besides, the parallel contrastive methods (Thiem, 2004, p 340) was also used to find out and discuss some similarities and differences in choosing domains and means by each journalist in chosen articles

CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSIONS

In this chapter, the results of the data analysis and the discussion of the findings revealing linguistic features expressing Affect in EVNs on social violence are presented with tables and figures for illustrations Besides, the similarities and dissimilarities of the linguistic features of Affect in two languages are discussed

4.1 Linguistic features of Affect in English news on social violence (ENOSV)

4.1.1 Semantic features in ENOSV

Of all 3828 words collected from 06 articles, there are 313 Affect resources in total The frequency of four sub-types of Affect in ENOSV is summarized in Table 4.1

Table 4.1 Four sub-types of Affect in ENOSV

of 72.5% It is followed by the appearance of Un/happiness with the rate of 19.2% in ENOSV Dis/satisfaction and Dis/inclination are less popularly used

in comparison with the others with the proportion of 6.1% and 2.2%

respectively The following extracts are given as examples of four semantic featues of Affect in ENOSV

(1) He admitted to shooting seventh-grade science teacher Jason Seaman and 13-year-old classmate Ella Whistler [E1.06.06]

(2) …before Boon also attacked his stepdaughter [E3.76.51]

(3) He stabbed her 49 times in the head, neck, body and arms…

[E4.16.18]

It can be seen that In/security value was used much more than other semantic features Violent behaviors were described through key words such

as shooting, attacked and stabbed These words expressing In/security

values found in many ENOSV could help the readers imagine the severity of the violent events as well as the physical injuries and emotional pain of victims

The second highest sub-type of Affect is Un/happiness By using Un/happiness value, the English journalists wanted to depict a huge outpouring of the President‟s and witnesses‟ grief for the school shooting resulting in 10 people dead and 10 wounded In the below examples, bad

feelings were expressed through words sad and heartbroken

(4) …and Donald Trump called it “a very sad day” [E2.20.18]

(5) We are heartbroken today [E2.107.73]

The Dis/inclination is less usual than the above two values The words

and groups such as dismiss and have not released showed that the authorities

did not provide any information on the gunman‟s motive for carrying out the horrific shooting Besides, the punishment for his previous offenses was not severe enough for him to stop harassing women and acting inappropriately For the reasons given above, it is not difficult for him to regularly commit crimes Lately, this shooter took full responsibility for the shooting taking

place at yoga studio that resulted in 2 people dead and 5 wounded

(6) Police have not released information on a motive [E5.22.15]

(7) …prosecutors agreed to dismiss the battery charge after Beierle completed a six-month diversion agreement… [E5.86.50]

Although Dis/satisfaction is the least common among the four

sub-types of Affect, the item anger described a lot of resentment of relatives of

victims towards the high school massacre carried out by students that led to

serious consequences Also, the word complained was used to express

growing criticisms over a male teacher‟s inappropriately touching a middle school girl

(8) …(a statement) expressing sorrow and anger over the shooting…

[E2.103.70]

(9) …that students and a parent complained about Beierle's conduct at

a different school prior to the May incident [E5.37.24]

To sum up, English journalist used evaluative language source for Affect appropriately and effectively All sub-type of Affect was found in English articles surveyed Specifically, there is a trend of employing much more In/security rather than the remaining three types since the severity of the violent events not only threatened victim‟s physical safety but also gave readers feelings of anxiety about their own safety in the future This result is consistent with the description of In/security value that Martin and White (2005) made earlier Besides, the frequency of the remaining three sub-types varies in distribution English journalists tended to use Un/happiness and Dis/inclination more and Dis/satisfaction less From this result, it can be inferred that everyone desires to take action on legislation to combat gun violence and fine heavily for violent behaviour so that such tragedies will be prevented in the future

4.8%

95.2%

4.1.2 Discourse features in ENOSV

4.1.2.1 Positive and Negative Affect resources

In discourse level, linguistic features expressing Affect can be either positively or negatively assessed Positive sentiments are concerned with jubilance, self-assurance, attentiveness, etc., while negative sentiments deal with depression, apprehension, nuisance, etc The results of the data analysis indicate that the distribution of positive polarity is vastly outnumbered by negative one in ENOSV as shown in Table 4.2

Table 4.2 Positive and Negative Affect resources in ENOSV

The statistics above are graphically illustrated in the chart below

Figure 4.1 Positive and Negative Affect resources in ENOSV

As can be seen from the figure, negative polarity makes up an overwhelming percentage of 95.2% It is the fact that fifteen positive instances in ENOSV are found, just accounting for 4.8% It means that English journalists had a tendency to express negative emotions in social violence newspaper The negative Affect in ENOSV is exemplified through

the following instances

(10) The boy apologized to Seaman and Whistler through a statement…[E1.14.12]

(11) I'm sorry for the pain [E1.19.14]

In the above examples, English journalists used such words as

apologized, sorry to express that the boy was full of remorse for his serious

crimes against his classmates and teachers

(12) Christopher Boon, 28, stabbed Laura Mortimer and her daughter Ella Dalby multiple times in the kitchen of their home… [E3.04.08] (13) Boon had hit her… [E3.38.38]

Also, the negative Affect resources were employed to show the barbarism of the violent behaviour against women and girls The words such

as stabbed, hit…were widely used in many ENOSV These Insecurity values

conveyed how tragic the situation was to readers When family violence exists, the home is not a safe place Specifically, the defendant attacked and killed both his wife and her daughter due to conflict within family

relationship

The values of positive Affect take up a minor proportion It is not difficult to identify that only two categories of positive Affect were employed

in ENOSV including Security and Inclination For examples,

(14) …until it is 100 percent certain… [E1.65.33]

(15) … we were really hoping… [E6.28.20]

The only Inclination value used in the collection of ENOSV is

expressed via the word certain, which indicated that the father of the shooting

victim hopes the shooter receives the appropriate sentence so that this gunner

is not a danger to anyone else Moreover, relatives of victims and authorities desire to avoid heart-breaking incidents in the future through using the word

hoping If there were no shooting, life would be happier, safer for everyone

To sum up, data analysis shows that there is a trend of using much more negative Affect than positive Affect It means that instances belonging

to Unhappiness, Dissatisfaction, Insecurity and Disinclination play an important role in the Affect system in ENOSV This explanation for this result is because the negative physical and mental effects made the victims of violent incidents increasingly anxious This finding is similar to that stated in (Martin & Rose, 2003) those write that negative emotions are attributed to negative Affect Also, positive sentiments making up a minority percentage expressed their deep longing for safety in the future

4.1.2.2 Explicitness and Implicitness

Affect resources can be realized either implicitly or explicitly The results of the analysis indicate that words and groups implicitly expressing Affect are outnumbered by those explicitly expressing Affect in ENOSV

Table 4.3 Explicitness and Implicitness in ENOSV

The statistics above are graphically illustrated in the chart below

Figure 4.2 Explicitness and Implicitness in ENOSV

99%

1%

Explicitness Implicitness

As can be seen from Table 4.3 and Figure 4.2, there is a favor toward explicit values in English articles surveyed In particular, among 313 Affect resources, only three implicit Affect are recorded, constituting 1% The demonstration for explicit Affect in ENOSV is presented by some following examples

(16) …and 10 (people have been) wounded in a shooting at

a Texas high school… [E2.03.05]

(17) .the tragedy (that) resulted in injury or death [E2.99.66],

[E2.99.67]

The values of Affect tend to be encoded more in an obvious way rather than an ambiguous way in order to indicate that violence affects physical and mental health of victims profoundly In the above examples, the items such as

have been wounded, injury, death conveyed negative impacts of mass

shootings on victims directly Besides the psychological crises, these victims also suffered great physical pains such as severe injuries or even death

Although the values of implicit Affect in ENOSV accounted for a small proportion, English writers strongly emphasized risk of violent behaviour towards relatives of victims, for example:

(18) …that one of Mortimer‟s friends and her family should “watch

their backs”… [E3.46.42]

In the example (18), the group “should watch their backs” was used

to show that there was a threat of retaliation against victim‟s friends and her family from her husband since they told her that her husband had an affair

To sum up, the more the explicit values of Affect in ENOSV were used, the clearer writers informed readers about the latest breaking news on violent crime Therefore, they easily expressed deep sympathy toward sufferers and wished that offenders were taken with disciplinary action for