TY - JOUR
T1 - Finding the Global Groove
T2 - Theorising and analysing dynamic reader positioning using Appraisal, corpus, and a concordancer
AU - O'Halloran, Kieran
AU - Coffin, Caroline
PY - 2005/9/1
Y1 - 2005/9/1
N2 - Within critical discourse analysis (CDA), there has been ongoing interest in how texts position readers to view social and political events in a particular way. Traditionally, analysts have not examined how positioning is built up dynamically as a reader progresses through a text by tracing how earlier parts of a text are likely to affect subsequent interpretation. This article shows how APPRAISAL tools (as developed within the systemic functional tradition) can be usefully employed within CDA to do this. Using a story from The Sun newspaper website as illustration, we show how due to a cumulative groove of semantic patterning, the reader is dynamically positioned to interpret a seemingly neutral statement at the end of the story in a negative way. We ‘over-interpretation’ can be checked through the use of a concordancer. We also demonstrate how a specialised corpus can go some way to grounding the APPRAISAL analysis in terms of the context of the target readership and the meanings they are routinely exposed
AB - Within critical discourse analysis (CDA), there has been ongoing interest in how texts position readers to view social and political events in a particular way. Traditionally, analysts have not examined how positioning is built up dynamically as a reader progresses through a text by tracing how earlier parts of a text are likely to affect subsequent interpretation. This article shows how APPRAISAL tools (as developed within the systemic functional tradition) can be usefully employed within CDA to do this. Using a story from The Sun newspaper website as illustration, we show how due to a cumulative groove of semantic patterning, the reader is dynamically positioned to interpret a seemingly neutral statement at the end of the story in a negative way. We ‘over-interpretation’ can be checked through the use of a concordancer. We also demonstrate how a specialised corpus can go some way to grounding the APPRAISAL analysis in terms of the context of the target readership and the meanings they are routinely exposed
U2 - 10.1080/17405900500283607
DO - 10.1080/17405900500283607
M3 - Article
SN - 1740-5904
SP - 143
EP - 163
JO - Critical Discourse Studies
JF - Critical Discourse Studies
ER -