As stressed by Martin and Rose (2007), evaluation is concerned with the attitudes and stances enacted in a text, particularly with the ways the values are introduced and voiced by various types of stances and how viewpoints can be enhanced or hedged within a text. As Stubbs (1996:197) points out, utterances always convey a point of view and speakers can differently express the same meaning with different layers of illocutionary force. Interestingly, this can be observed by looking at different linguistic resources adopted by the text source such as propositional information, modality and concession, as well as specific lexical choice and syntactic structures. Such linguistic tools can be applied to the analysis of media texts, with special regard to news discourse – considered as a product rather than a natural phenomenon (Fowler 1991). While News language is supposed to be a value-free representation of events, journalists’ stance and viewpoints are encoded in textual strategies and grammatical phrasing, showing that news discourse is in fact a construction of reality. The present study analyses how British and Italian TV news programmes reported a clash that occurred between the Manchester United fans and the Rome police in April 2007. although the verbal as well as the visual levels of resources are equally implied in the construction of the overall evaluative meaning since “[they] run in counterpoint rather than exactly in parallel” (Montgomery 2007: 75), it must be pointed out that in the course of the present study, our main focus will be on the verbal elements and only brief reference to the visual text will be provided, mostly by referencing to the position of the journalists towards camera.
Decoding evaluation in British and Italian TV news reports: the case of the Rome riot
VENUTI, MARCO;
2009-01-01
Abstract
As stressed by Martin and Rose (2007), evaluation is concerned with the attitudes and stances enacted in a text, particularly with the ways the values are introduced and voiced by various types of stances and how viewpoints can be enhanced or hedged within a text. As Stubbs (1996:197) points out, utterances always convey a point of view and speakers can differently express the same meaning with different layers of illocutionary force. Interestingly, this can be observed by looking at different linguistic resources adopted by the text source such as propositional information, modality and concession, as well as specific lexical choice and syntactic structures. Such linguistic tools can be applied to the analysis of media texts, with special regard to news discourse – considered as a product rather than a natural phenomenon (Fowler 1991). While News language is supposed to be a value-free representation of events, journalists’ stance and viewpoints are encoded in textual strategies and grammatical phrasing, showing that news discourse is in fact a construction of reality. The present study analyses how British and Italian TV news programmes reported a clash that occurred between the Manchester United fans and the Rome police in April 2007. although the verbal as well as the visual levels of resources are equally implied in the construction of the overall evaluative meaning since “[they] run in counterpoint rather than exactly in parallel” (Montgomery 2007: 75), it must be pointed out that in the course of the present study, our main focus will be on the verbal elements and only brief reference to the visual text will be provided, mostly by referencing to the position of the journalists towards camera.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
