St. Theresa Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences An Appraisal and Corpus-informed study of Media attitudes towards the Government leader found in Bangkok Post during the 2013 - 2014 Political unrest in Thailand Wimonwan Aungsuwan Ph.D. Student in English Language Studies, Department of English, Thammasat University, Thailand Email: [email protected] Abstract The previous studies have been concerned with political conflicts in Thailand in many aspects such as cohesion and lexical analyses and the comparison between various news agencies (Chana, 2011, and Chantrasupawong, 2011), and media attitudes towards Yingluck Shinawatra found in The Nation (Aungsuwan, 2017). However, little attention has been paid to attitudes towards Yingluck Shinawatra found in Bangkok Post. Thus, this corpus-informed study aims to identify typical collocations of the appraising items in each judgement type with an attempt to uncover positive and negative attitudes towards Yinglucks Shinawatra found in Bangkok Post. The corpus data in this study were compiled from English daily online newspaper: Bangkok Post, 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. Typical lexical items used to express each judgement type based on the Appraisal Theory (normality, abnormality, capacity, incapacity, tenacity, untenacity, veracity, inveracity, propriety, and impropriety), as well as their collocations generated by Antconc corpus analysis software, were identified and analyzed to uncover the media attitudes. The results revealed that Bangkok Post contained more various judgement types than those found in The Nation such as normality, capacity, incapacity, tenacity, untenacity, veracity, inveracity, propriety, and impropriety. Implications of the study in relation to journalism, news readers, and future research are also discussed. Keywords: appraisal; corpus linguistics; judgement; political unrest in Thailand; Bangkok Post; Yingluck Shinawatra Vol.3 No.2 July-December 2017 36 St. Theresa Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 1. Introduction, Rationale for the Study, and Research Questions The study of media attitudes towards issues or news subjects being reported can be considered as part of research in media discourse, which is known to be a study of interactions that take place through a broadcast platform (O’Keeffe, 2011). While earlier studies on media discourse put an emphasis on linguistic analysis, recent studies have shifted to an examination of attitudes and evaluation in media texts which can be manifested in various forms using various tools. One of the recent approaches used for scrutinizing evaluation in texts is the Appraisal Theory which largely looks into the attitudinal positioning in many aspects: combination of frequency comparison of appraisal types and meaning of appraisal types (Birot, 2008), frequency comparison of appraisal types (Dongmei & Xuehua, 2013; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2012), and meaning of Appraisal types (Ben-Aaron, 2005; Hardy, 2011; Hood, 2004; Tilakaratna & Mahboob 2012). In this study, the Appraisal framework, particularly the sub-system of “judgement”, is adopted as the main analytical framework because it accommodates different types of judgements or attitudes, each type being clearly classified into positive and negative stances. Moreover, the framework is strongly associated with lexical choices that manifest or represent each judgement type, which fits well with the analysis of journalistic texts in which lexical selection forms an important basis of news reports. Appraisal-based studies have recently been influenced by a more data-driven approach to linguistic research, particularly research in Corpus Linguistics, or the use of naturally-occurring texts known as a corpus (or language corpora) for an examination of typicality and centrality of lexical behavior and phraseology such as collocation and language patterning with the help of various tools equipped in corpus analysis software (Baker, 2006, 2011; Bowker & Pearson, 2002; McEnery, Xiao, & Tono, 2006; Hunston, 2002). Following a wide range of research that utilizes language corpora to investigate appraisals and stances of writers/speakers (Cabrejas- Penuelas and Diez-Prados, 2014; Carretero and Taboada 2014; Coffin and O’Halloran, 2010; and Lawson, 2014), the present study also draws data from a corpus of authentic media texts and adopts corpus research tools and techniques to identify and analyze instances of appraisal types. It also conforms to the previous work that focuses on the meaning of appraisal types cited by (Coffin & O’Halloran, 2010). However, unlike some studies that base their analysis on a very small corpus data, this research has attempted to make use of a fairly large size of corpus in order to decrease researchers’ certain cognitive and possibly ideological bias, linguistic Vol.3 No.2 July-December 2017 37 St. Theresa Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences intuitions and chancy. In terms of corpus tools, this work uses more tools than described in the previous work including wordlist, keyword list and concordance for key politician selection and data analysis. As far as the research context is concerned, the political unrest under examination refers to a political conflict between the government and the anti- government supporters from 31 October 2013 to 22 May 2014. The anti-government demonstrations were organized by the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) led by former Democrat Party MP Suthep Thaugsuban. According to Chaubey (2014), one of the most important triggers of the protest was a proposed blanket amnesty bill that would have pardoned several politicians from various charges since 2004, including Thaksin Shinawatra, Suthep Thaugsuban and Abhisit Vejjajiva. Despite the amnesty bill being withdrawn on November 2013, protests in Bangkok continued. Thaugsuban and eight other Democrat members of parliament resigned from their positions to lead the demonstrations, calling for the general populace to strike and undertake civil disobedience. The protests gradually shifted towards an anti-government agenda, criticizing Shinawatra and her government for being proxies for Thaksin Shinawatra and being an elective dictatorship. On December 2013, in response to opposition pressure, PM Yingluck Shinawatra dissolved parliament and announced that early elections would be held in February 2014 but rejects calls for her to step down in the meantime. On May 22 2014, the Royal Thai Armed Forces, led by General Prayut Chan-o-cha, Commander of the Royal Thai Army (RTA), launched a coup d'état which was the end of the political conflicts which ended Shinawatra’s status and the street protest led by Thaugsuban (BBC, 7 May 2014, 22 May 2014, 23 January 2015, 19 August 2015). While there are studies, that examine media coverage of political conflicts in Thailand, most of which looking into cohesion and lexical analyses and the comparison between various news agencies (Chana, 2011, and Chantrasupawong, 2011). In addition, the previous work has been concerned with media attitudes towards Yingluck Chinawatra found in The Nation (Aungsuwan, 2017). However, little attention has been paid to attitudes towards Yingluck Shinawatra found in Bangkok Post. As a result, this study aimed at investigating media attitudes towards the government leader, Yingluck Shinawatra using a detailed appraisal framework based on a large corpus of news reports. It specifically attempts to provide a qualitative and objective analysis to find out the local English-language newspaper Vol.3 No.2 July-December 2017 38 St. Theresa Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences appraise the government leader. The research goals could then be described in terms of specific research questions as follows: 1. What are the key appraising items identified in each judgement type? 2. What are the typical collocations of those key appraising items? 3. How do the appraising items and their collocations express positive and negative attitudes of the media on the government leader under investigation? 2. Literature review Appraisal is developed and heavily influenced by a broader, widely- researched area of Systemic Functional Linguistics or SFL (Halliday, 1978, 2004; Halliday & Hasan, 1989). While SFL focuses more the three kinds of function, or metafunction simultaneously: ideational metafunction, interpersonal metafunction, and textual metafunction (Halliday et al., 1989), the Appraisal Theory puts more emphasis on different types of judgements and the lexico-grammatical resources employed in expressing opinions or attitudes towards a person or an entity. The framework offers a comprehensive means of exploring judgements made by speakers or writers on people generally, other writers/speakers and their utterances, material objects, happenings and states of affairs. It also explores how attitudes, judgements and emotive responses are explicitly presented in texts and how they may be more indirectly implied, presupposed or assumed (Bednarek, 2006; Hunston, 2011; Macken-Horarik, 2014; Martin and Rose, 2007, and White, 2012). The appraisal contains two main types or positioning including attitudinal positioning, and dialogistic positioning. Attitudinal positioning can be divided into three main types including affect, judgement, and appreciation. In addition, dialogistic positioning is concerned with dialogistic contraction, and dialogistic expansion. As mentioned earlier, this