The strategic ritual of emotionality in Chinese and Australian hard news: a corpus-based study

ABSTRACT

This article, based on the appraisal framework, investigates the ways in which Chinese and Australian journalists strategically mobilize and mediate emotions in hard news reporting on risk events that disturb social order. Drawing on a newly built comparable corpus of Chinese and Australian hard news reporting on risk events, the study found that both Chinese and Australian journalists endeavour to reconstruct social order in the face of risk events mainly through building a shared feeling community. However, Chinese and Australian journalists strategically communicate emotions to construct different centres of social values. In Australian hard news, the centre of social values holding the nation together is construed through ordinary citizens, whereas in the Chinese context the centre is construed through power elites. The article argues that such different strategic rituals of emotionality are conditioned by the press conditions (e.g. tightening media budget, increasing press competition, and rising broadloidization), and that they reflect divergent stances undertaken by Chinese and Australian journalists.

KEYWORDS:

• Appraisal
• corpus-based
• hard news
• ritual of emotionality
• social values
• risk

Acknowledgements

The author expresses his sincere thanks to his supervisor, the late Emeritus Professor Christopher N. Candlin at Macquarie University, Sydney, for his excellent supervision of author’s doctoral project, of which the current article is only one part. The author extends his gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their critical but constructive comments, and to Dr Weiwei Zhang for her careful reading of an earlier version of the article. The author assumes responsibility for any remaining errors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Changpeng Huan is Lecturer at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China. He obtained a PhD degree in Linguistics at Macquarie University, Australia. His research interests include corpus linguistics, discourse studies, ethnographic research, evaluative language, and systemic functional linguistics. His publications appear in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Discourse & Communication, Discourse, Context & Media, Discourse & Society, Journal of Pragmatics, as well as in edited volumes (Palgrave Macmillan).

Notes

1. Following the tradition of appraisal studies, scare quotes are adopted to indicate sub-systems of the appraisal framework and their features.

Additional information

Funding

The publication of the article was sponsored by the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Grant (Culutre research Project) [grant number 16JCWH13] at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the Shanghai Pujiang Program [grant number 17PJC058]).