CDA Undertaken through SFL: Employment of Appraisal in Critical Discourse Analysis of the News

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is concerned with power relations enacted through discourse and discursive ideological load of texts. Such power is realized through discourse of people in power; i.e. people who have access to scarce social resources, and therefore has a powerful discourse as well. CDA endeavors to lay bare such power relations and hidden ideologies. On the other hand, Appraisal is a framework belonging to interpersonal, social metafiction of language in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This framework deals with how evaluations are realized through discourse. Appraisal encompasses three subsystems, one of them being Attitude – the subsystem employed in this study. The present research aims at suggesting Appraisal, more precisely its Attitude, as a linguistic tool to conduct CDA more objectively and more scientists; and fill the gap Van Dijk had pointed out regarding the need for a linguistically-oriented tool for CDA, since almost all CDA has been conducted subjectively to date. To demonstrate the extent to which this tool works in CDA, three news reports about November 2015 Paris attacks were chosen and analyzed employing Attitude. These reports were chosen due to the critical nature of the event, and also since journalists in any society are regarded as discursively powerful individuals, who can impress their audience ideologically. Each of these three reports represented a specific situation considering how journalists reporting various aspects of the same event might use or might not use the power they have and in what direction. The data obtained out of the Attitudinal analysis of these reports were totally in line with what was inferred in subjective analysis of them – the classic method of conducting CDA. It would be concluded that the employment of Appraisal in CDA as a linguistic tool works well, and more objective CDA practices would be feasible by doing so. This suggested a new method of CDA is worthy of being used as a supportive method at least (beside the subjective classic methods).