DOI: 10.14457/tu.the.2016.514
title: A corpus-informed study of media attitudes using the appraisal framework: an analysis of newspaper reports on two opposing politicians during the 2013 – 2014 political unrest in Thailand

description: This corpus-informed study aims to investigate similarities and differences in terms of the frequencies of judgment types imposed on Yingluck Shinawatra and Suthep Thaugsuban in two English-language newspapers in Thailand, to uncover positive and negative attitudes deduced from the analysis of collocations of the key appraising items, and to identify keywords and find out how the keywords, when examined in collocation with words denoting the two politicians, suggest the attitudes of the media towards the politicians.  The corpus data in this study were compiled from two English daily online newspapers: Bangkok Post and The Nation, focusing on political conflicts in Thailand between Shinawatra’s government and the anti-government members which took place between 31 October 2013 and 22 May 2014. To investigate the frequencies of judgement types, concordance lines for the two politicians, generated by Antconc corpus analysis software, which illustrate judgement categories based on the Appraisal Theory (normality, abnormality, capacity, incapacity, tenacity, untenacity, veracity, inveracity, propriety, and impropriety) were counted and statistically compared within and across different media sources. To examine appraising terms and collocations, typical lexical items used to express each judgement type, as well as their collocations, were identified and analyzed to uncover the media attitudes. Finally, keyness analysis was used to extract keywords found in each news corpus, and concordance lines in which those keywords were found in collocation with the two political figures were identified and analyzed to suggest how the two media appraise the two key news subjects.The results based on the frequency analysis of judgement types suggested that over all there were higher numbers of corpus-attested instances of appraised extracts on the Prime Minister than those imposed on the anti-government leader. When comparing the appraisal imposed to the two politicians, it was found that more instances of the tenacity and propriety types were associated with the Prime Minister, while more instances of the normality type were imposed on the demonstration leader. A further analysis of appraisal on each politician revealed that both news subjects were appraised more negatively than positively in the two newspapers, although the Prime Minister appeared to have negative evaluation specifically on capacity and propriety, while the anti-government leader seemed to have negative evaluation on impropriety in particular. The analysis of appraising items and their collocations as well as the examination of keywords in each news corpus in collocation with words denoting the two political figures also conformed to the quantitative findings. That was, the Prime Minister was appraised positively as a flexible politician who was determined to resolve the political tension by democratic means, but at the same time being negatively appraised in terms of capacity, dependency, and alleged corruption and law breaking. The anti-government leader was positively appraised as a popular leader of the demonstration, but was criticized as adopting a fairly violent and undemocratic way of protest. Implications of the study in relation to journalism, pedagogy, and future research are also discussed.