Evaluating news actors in Chinese hard news reporting: language patterns and social values

Abstract

Abstract This paper interrogates the ways Chinese journalists judge behaviors of different news actors (individuals or institutions written about in a news report) in Chinese hard news reporting on risk events. Drawing on a newly constructed corpus of hard news reporting and following theappraisalframework, the study examines language patterns ofjudgementand suggests how lexicogrammatical patterns ofjudgement, semantic features ofjudgementand social orders are intimately connected. Corpus analytic findings show that news actors of different social statuses are judged in different manners. Social elites are primarily judged positively in relation to their “capacity” and “tenacity” in dealing with risk situations, whereas ordinary risk makers are mainly judged negatively in relation to their “propriety” in producing risk situations. Additionally, the samejudgementmarker in the same phraseological pattern may realize different valences ofjudgementin relation to news actors of different social statuses, andjudgementof different news actors tends to select distinctive local patterns. It is argued that such different discursive patterns of judging news actors point to the distinction in the way social values are (re)produced and journalistic professional practices undertaken in the production of Chinese hard news.

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