A contrastive study of attitudinal resources in english and vietnamese news report towards plastic straws

QUY NHON UNIVERSITYTỐNG MỸ LINH A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF ATTITUDINAL RESOURCES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE NEWS REPORTS ON PLASTIC STRAWS Field: English Linguistics Code: 8220201 Supervisor:

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

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

Mã số : 8220201

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 currentlybeing submitted for any other degree or award

Binh Dinh, 2020

Tong My Linh

I am grateful to many individuals who have heartened me in variousways to achieve my accomplishment today.

I would like to express my deep and sincere gratitude to my researchsupervisor, Assoc Prof Dr Nguyen Thi Thu Hien for giving me theopportunity to do research and providing invaluable guidance throughout thisthesis Without her timely enlightenment, my M.A journey could have beeninterrupted Her dynamism, vision, dedication and motivation have deeplyinspired me She has taught me the methodology to carry out the research andpresent the research as clearly as possible It is really a great privilege andhonor to work and study under her guidance

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

Next, my sincere thanks go to all of my classmates, M.A students ofEnglish 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 mydebt to my family for their unconditional love and tremendous encouragement.Without their supports, I could not have overcome all the challenges andobstacles on my academic pathway

The thesis applied Appraisal Theory in a contrastive analysis ofAttitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese news reports on plasticstraws The data is composed of 20 news reports (10 in English and 10 inVietnamese) collected from reliable online websites The study aims atdiscovering 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 andthe features of the evaluative language employed by English and Vietnamesewriters in their news reports

Cap : Judgment: Capacity

Comp : Appreciation: Composition

EPSNRs : English plastic straws news reports

Nor : Judgment: Normality

Prop : Judgment: Propriety

Reac : Appreciation: Reaction

Sat : Affect: Dis/Satisfaction

Sec : Affect: In/Security

Ten : Judgment: Tenacity

Val : Appreciation: Valuation

Ver : Judgment: Veracity

VPSNRs : Vietnamese plastic straws news

reports

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

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

2.2 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

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

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

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 thestudy, 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 hotissue lately The small and seemingly harmless utensil that goes generallyunnoticed in our everyday life has made it onto 2018’s most-wanted list If it issurprising to hear that plastic straws are receiving backlash, it may be even moreastonishing to figure out about ninety one percent of the plastic we use is notrecycled and instead ends up in landfills or the ocean It is estimated that anaverage person uses 1.6 straws per day, which means around 8.5 billion plasticstraws are thrown away each year, potentially contributing to over 150 milliontons of plastic in the world’s oceans Because of the statistics, somemunicipalities and corporations are starting to make efforts to fight pollution andcontrol the utilization of plastic straws Additionally, numerous talks, videos,news reports and documentaries have been carried out to partially contribute toeliminating plastic straws and increasing public awareness of the issue However,news reports are considered an effective tool to reflect social issues as well asone 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 ofthe issues’ influence but also the reporters themselves knowing how to get theiroutcome 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 thatemotions are extracted from our evaluations (appraisals or estimates) of eventsthat cause specific reactions in different people Essentially, our appraisal of asituation causes an emotional, or affective, response that is going to be based onthat appraisal Martin & White (2005) claims that Appraisal Theory framework is

a particular approach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language isused 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 andinterpersonal 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 evaluativelanguage between the high-rated and low-rated English argumentative essays byEFL students in two Chinese universities An attitudinal analysis of the novelGreat Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald was carried out by Hadidi &Mohammadbagheri-Parvin (2015) Xiaolin Liu (2010) tried to apply AppraisalTheory into teaching process in an attempt to get better results for students ofEnglish Vo Duy Duc (2011) studied journalistic voices operating in EnglishVietnamese hard news reports in the light of Appraisal Theory Additionally,Appraisal Theory was also applied to examine the social attitudes in news reportstowards an important event Nguyen Thi Thu Hien (2016) carried out researchingthe 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 widevariety of genres, which proves its significance as a theoretical framework to helpunderstand the evaluative language However, there has not been any contrastive

study of attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese news reports towardsplastic straws, which means there is a gap available for my thesis It is for thosereasons 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 inEnglish and Vietnamese news reports towards plastic straws to find out thesimilarities and differences in the way English and Vietnamese authors showtheir attitudes on such issue

1.2.2 Objectives of the study

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

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

- To discuss the similarities and discrepancies regarding the Attitudinalresource 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 inEnglish and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws?

2 What are the similarities and differences of the Attitudinal resources inEnglish 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 10news reports written by English authors and another 10 written by Vietnameseauthors on plastic straws from reliable websites

1.5 Significance of the study

This study is expected to contribute to the research, performance, andinterpretation of attitudinal values from the theoretical as well as practicalperspectives Regarding theoretical aspect, this study lays a stress on thesignificant role of Appraisal Theory as an analytical framework which helps tohighlight the language of evaluation Moreover, this study may be a newapproach to gain an insight into the features of attitudinal values conveyed bynews reports in English and Vietnamese Additionally, it is supposed to provide areliable reference for the readers who are interested in attitudinal values so thatthey are likely to have a thorough grasp of the evaluative language Practically,the study is considered to offer specific implications for Vietnamese teachers andlearners of English concerning sharpening their English-speaking skills both inclassroom 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 studyand 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 alsopresented

Chapter 3, Research Methodology, discusses research methods of research,

comprising data collection, data analysis, the reliability and validity of theresearch

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 forfurther 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 andorganization of the study In other words, Chapter 1 aims at offering an overview

of the contents of the following chapters, contributing to sketching the researchoutline to follow

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter involves a brief overview of the fundamental dimensionsfunctioning 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 byProfessor James Martin of the Linguistics Department at University of Sydney inthe 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 thingsand people

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

particular approach to evaluate language, adopt stances, construct textualcharacters, and constitute interpersonal positioning and relationships It probeshow speakers/writers pass their attitudes, judgments, or opinions onlisteners/readers to form alliances with those who have the same experience andview 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 tellinglisteners/readers how they feel about relevant persons or things

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 readersinformed of our sentiments regarding things and people; in other words, ourattitudes

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 appraisalsystems 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 Expand.

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, sothey are not examined

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 withparticipants 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, whichare 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 ornegative view vis-à-vis experiential phenomena or propositions about thosephenomena

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

ethics/morality (rules and regulations) feeling institutionalized as proposals

Figure 2 3 Judgment and Appreciation as Institutionalized Affect (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

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

- 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 describedbut those of other human individuals or groups As a result, he/she makes use ofthe 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 humoroften 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 tobehave 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)

- lucky, natural, odd, cool,

- normal, natural, familiar,.

- cool, stable, predictable,

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]

- good, moral, ethical,

- law abiding, fair, just,

- bad, immoral, evil,

- corrupt, unfair, unjust,

PROPRIETY - sensitive, kind, caring, - insensitive, mean, cruel,

(how far beyond reproach?) - unassuming, modest,

humble,

- polite, respectful, reverent,

- 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 (aseither 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

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,

- bad, nasty, ugly,

- symmetrical, proportional,.

- consistent, considered, logical,

- unbalanced, discordant, irregular,

- uneven, flawed,

- contradictory, disorganized,

COMPLEXITY

- simple, pure, elegant,

- lucid, clear, precise,

- rich, detailed,

- extravagant, byzantine,

- arcane, unclear,

- plain, monolithic, simplistic,

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 theaspects 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 likeEnglish 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) andexplicit (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 ofteaching college English reading, which will be helpful to solve the problems inthe 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 aChinese essay In this study, the Chinese text was found to have fewer affect andjudgment items to avoid direct ethical or moral evaluations and disclosure ofpersonal emotions for either face-saving or self-protection, which, as theresearchers suggested, reflected a Chinese practice of language and rhetoric toachieve 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 evaluativelanguage between the high- and low-rated English argumentative essays by twoChinese university EFL students The study found that the high-rated essaysuccessfully employed appraisal values to foreground authorial voice andposition readers The study suggests that more attention should be given to theteaching of EFL/ESL writing from an interpersonal perspective and

proposes the necessity of explaining EFL/ESL students’ use of evaluativelanguage 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 novelwas 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 challengetheir colleagues' views This may be interpreted as an attempt to address apotentially 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 theemotion expressed by the author and how significant the attitude meaning was inbuilding interpersonal relations between the author and readers

In terms of business English, Vo Duy Duc (2011) compared and contrastedthe 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 withinvestigating whether the business hard news reporting of the two languagesshared the same system of voices or not The findings of the study showed thatthe English and Vietnamese business texts generally experienced the similarstructure - and that these news stories basically operated with the same reportervoice However, the two languages reflected considerable differences in the

representation of the key social groups in terms of the ideologies embedded in thetwo 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 reportstowards 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 theappraisers, appraisal’s objects, the prejudice of the appraisers and of the writers.The results show that the appraisers expressed their attitudes about five objects ofappraisal differently Most of the viewpoints showed positive feelings, emotions

or judgments In addition, the appraisers tend to express their own emotions andevaluate Obama’s visit- related entities instead of the people’s behavior Thefindings also showed that the appraisers were prone to a safe stance either byavoiding 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 ThiMinh Ngan (2017)), judges’ comments (Nguyen Thanh Tri (2018), Le Huu Loc,(2019)), English advertisements of product (Pham Thi Thuy Ngoc (2017)), lovesong 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 studymakes 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

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3.1 Research Design

This study was carried out with the combination of both qualitative andquantitative approaches The qualitative approach was employed to analyzeand describe the attitudinal resources via news reports in English as well asVietnamese 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 castinglight on the question of how frequently the attitudinal resources weredicovered

Additionally, the analytic and synthetic techniques were utilizedharmoniously for the scrutinization process The analytic practice assisted inpinpointing and separating certain aspects to concentrate The syntheticpractice 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 contrasttechniques assisted in the similarities and discrepancies regarding the

Attitudinal resources in English and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws.

3.2 Data Collection

Ten English and ten Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws werecollected from online national newspapers such as Thanhnien, Tuoitre,

newspapers like Nationalgeographic, Theguardian, Globalnews, and Reuters.The length of the reports fluctuated from 799 words to 1815 words and thenews reports served the analysis of the evaluative language The reports metsome 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 little- but-they-are-part-of-a-huge-problem

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost/plastic-straws-are-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 https://phapluat.tuoitrethudo.com.vn/ong-hut-giay-tot-hon-ong-hut-nhua- nhung-co-thuc-su-vi-moi-truong

4 https://tuoitre.vn/31-quan-ca-phe-o-da-nang-noi-khong-voi-do-nhua

5 http://khampha.vn/khoa-hoc-cong-nghe/ong-hut-nhua-co-phai-la-ke-thu- that-su-cua-hanh-tinh-nay

6 https://baodautu.vn/nestle-milo-ra-mat-ong-hut-giay-cho-san-pham-milo- bua-sang-khuyen-khich-thoi-quen-tieu-dung-xanh

https://baobihuuco.com/tai-sao-ong-hut-nhua-dang-dan-bi-cam-tren-the-3.3 Data Analysis

The system of Attitude in Appraisal Theory was applied as the

theoretical framework for the procedures of data analysis The collected datawere 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, quantitativemethods were utilized to uncover the frequency of their occurrence anddisclose 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: collecting ten English news reports and ten Vietnamese news reports on plastic

-into categories: English news reports on plastic straws and Vietnamese news reports on plastic straws;

- encoding EPSNRs from E1 to E321 and VPSNRs from V1 to V317;

- analyzing the Attitudinal resources in the corpus of VPSNRs and EPSNRs;

- giving out the frequencies / percentage of occurrence of the resources;

- carrying out a contrastive analysis to uncover the similarities and differences

in terms of the language of evaluation in both languages;

- evaluating and discussing the comparison results to indicate researchfindings;

- putting forwards implications for teaching and learning English;

- suggesting further studies

3.5 Reliability and validity in the research

The reliability was secured because Appraisal Theory by Martin and

White (2005) was chosen as the fundamental framework for this study.Moreover, the data were gathered from reliable and approved websites such asThanhnien, Tuoitre, Vietnamnet, TuanVietnam, Vnexpress,Nationalgeographic, Theguardian, Globalnews, and Reuters

In terms of validity, the data met the necessary standard criteria Thedata for the research proved its originality since they had not been utilized inany research regarding Attitudinal resources