Previous PageNext Page

Return to listing of notes in this Guide | Return to Appraisal Homepage

4. Intertextual positioning

Attribution and authorial endorsement

This unit is concerned with the linguistic resources by which speakers/writers include, and adopt a stance towards, what they represent as the words, observations, beliefs and viewpoints of other speakers/writers. This is an area which has been widely covered in the literature under such headings as "attribution", "direct and indirect speech", 'intertextuality" and, following Bakhtin, "heteroglossia". At its most basic, this attribution or intertextual positioning is brought into play when a writer/speaker chooses to quote or reference the words or thoughts of another. By referencing the words of another, the writer, at the very least, indicates that these words are in some way relevant to his/her current communicative purposes. Thus the most basic intertextual evaluation is one of implied `relevance'.

Endorsement

Once an attributed proposition has been included (and hence evaluated as `relevant') it can the be further evaluated as `endorsed' or `disendorsed'. The endorsed utterance is one which the writer either directly in indirectly indicates support for, or agreement with. The endorsed utterance is represented as true or reliable or convincing.

Thus,

He punctures the romantic myth that the mafia started as Robin Hood-style groups of men protecting the poor. He shows that the mafia began in the 19th century as armed bands protecting the interests of the absentee landlords who owned most of Sicily. He also demonstrates how the mafia has forged links with Italy's ruling Christian Democrat party since the war, and how the state has fought to destroy the criminal organisation despite the terror campaign that assassinated anti-mafia judges, such as Giovanni Falcone. (From the Cobuild Bank of English)

Here the use of the quoting verbs `show' and `demonstrate' signals endorsement for the attributed author's observations about the Mafia.

Similarly,

Elsewhere, he espoused the thesis, convincingly propounded also by other Marxists, that Marx evolved from his Eurocentric perspective of the 1850s towards a stance of anti-colonialism and of rejection of the unqualified idea that the capitalist destruction of pre-capitalist agrarian structures was necessary and inevitable. (Cobuild: UKBooks)

It is interesting to note that a speaker/writer may endorse (indicate that they support, hold-to-be true) a proposition while distancing themselves from the speaker/writer themselves. Consider, for example,

The Government has finally conceded that they made a mistake.

Here the term "concede" carries a number of connotations. Firstly, of course, it indicates that the Government only reluctantly came to offer up the proposition that "we made a mistake". "Concede" like "admit" implies that the attributed source has been "holding out on us" so to speak and has only now been compelled, somehow, to reveal the truth. And, secondly, of course, there is the implication that what is "conceded" is "the truth of the matter" - that is to say, the proposition framed in this way is represented as true. Accordingly a positive endorsement is not of the quoted source, but of their proposition or proposal.

Disendorsement

Under disendorsement, writers/speakers distances themselves from the utterance, indicating that they take no responsibility for its reliability. This is commonly done by the use of a quoting verb such as `to claim' and `allege'. Thus,

Tickner said regardless of the result, the royal commission was a waste of money and he would proceed with a separate inquiry into the issue headed by Justice Jane Matthews. His attack came as the Aboriginal women involved in the demanded a female minister examine the religious beliefs they claim are inherent in their fight against a bridge to the island near Goolwa in South Australia. (OzNews)

Here, of course, the journalist distances him/herself from - or `disendorses' - the proposition put by the Aboriginal women that they have religious reasons to oppose the building of the bridge.

Similarly,

Even in jail there are many rumours circulating about Tyson. One is that he has converted to Islam and will be known as Malik Abdul Aziz. Another rumour is that he is engaged to a childhood sweetheart and he is regularly allowed to have sex with the girl about to become Mrs Tyson-or Mrs Aziz. He reportedly said, We're keeping the date of the wedding secret. I don't want people to know her name (UKMags)

One quite common and interesting mechanism for more indirectly indicating dis-endorsement is to characterise the utterance as unexpected or surprising.

Surprisingly, McGuinness is especially scathing about `the chattering classes', of which he has long been a member. (Dissent: p.6, Number 4, Summer 2000/2001)

Disendorsement can, however, go beyond such `distancing' to the point of absolute rejection or denial of the attributed proposition. Thus,

More recent evaluation in the field convinces me that the ANU team are seriously in error: the age of the burial is considerably less than 62,000 years. In this context, the claim that "this more than trebles the date for humanity's first arrival on the continent" is sheer nonsense. (The Australian, Opinion Pages, 10/01/2001)

Thus to summarise, the question here is one of whether the writer indicates support for, acceptance of, or agreement with the views or observations provided by the attributed material. To regularise our treatment somewhat, we can say that writers can either choose to remain neutral with respect to endorsement (neither endorsing or disendorsing) or they can choose to actively take a position (endorsing or disendorsing).

I summarise the set of options for endorsement/disendorsement below. (See Figure 1 below).

Figure 1: Endorsement options

Responsibility

It may also be useful, in some analytical contexts, to consider these and related resources in terms of who is presented as taking responsibility for the utterance under consideration. Does, for example, the author,

  • take sole responsibility for the utterance (as will typically be the case for all unattributed material),
  • does the author present him/herself as taking NO responsibility for the utterance (as will typically be the case with dis-endorsed attributed material)
  • or does the author indicate that he/she shares some responsibility for the utterance with the attributed sources (as typically the case with endorsed attributed material)?

Thus,

Figure 2: options for authorial responsibility

Source specification.

Another important issue relates to the nature of the source to whom the material is attributed. Here we are concerned with the nature and status of the social actor from whom/which the externally sourced statements are said to derived. Following closely the work on social actors by van Leeuwen ( 1996), we are interested in the following types of distinctions,

  • (personalisation) Is the source represented as human (personalised) or as non-human (impersonalised, for example, a report, study or experiment)? If it is personalised, is it present as a particular human (or group of humans), or as an institutional sources - eg "The Prime Minister stated that... (human) versus "The Government is of the opinion that ...." (institutional)?
  • (identification) Is the source named identified (named) versus unidentified (unnamed, anonymous or generalised) - for example, "The Minister, Mr Byers said..." (named) versus "A prominent backbencher said..." (unnamed); "The Australian Congress of Environmental Scientists believes..." (identified) versus "Environmental scientists believe..." (unnamed); or "informed sources indicate... (anonymous) or "it is generally believed that...", "there is a consensus that..." (generalised)?
  • (specification) Is the source a specific individual or group, or an example of a generic class - eg "Staff at my son's school say they are unhappy with the new policy on class sizes" (specific) versus "Teachers say they are unhappy with the new policy on class sizes" (generic)?; "The members of my jazz band hold that Country and Western music ought to be outlawed" versus "Jazz musicians hold that Country and Western ought to be outlawed"; "40 percent of those interviewed for the survey believe that global warming is a real risk" (specific) versus "Australians believe that global warming is a real risk" (generic)
  • (Grouping) Is the source an individual or a grouping - eg "My next door neighbour believes..." versus "My next door neighbours believe..." or "40 percent of Australians believe.." or "Cricket followers believe..."? or "Australians believe.."? If the source is a grouping, is it (a) an aggregate (groups of participants treated as a statistic) eg "40 percent of Australians believe..", "the people surveyed believe...", (b) a collective (people gathered together on the basis of some shared quality or feature), eg - "climate experts believe...", "Australians believe..." or (c) an association (a grouping contingently brought together essentially because they share the view which is being attributed at this point in he text) - eg "Both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition believe...", or 'politicians, bureaucrats and economists believe..."? (These associations will, of course, be made up of either individuals, or different types of groupings - thus "politicians, bureaucrats and economists" is an association of collectives.)
  • (Status) Is the source associated with some level of status, authority or power in the current speech community? If so, would that status be high or low?

The type of sourcing employed by writer/speaker can be seen as having an impact on both the textual persona they construct for themselves and on the way they position their utterances with respect to likely responses from actual or potential respondents. Thus, following from what van Leeuwen (1996) has observed (and Bernstein 1970 and Bourdieu 1986 before him), to employ personalised, named individualised social actors as sources is to construct the speaker/writer as engaged concretely and directly with some specific-here-and-now, while to employ unnamed, generic and collectivised sources, for example, is to represent the author as in a position to distance him/herself from any specific reality, to generalise, abstract and universalise. Equally, of course, source type has an impact on dialogic positioning. Thus, by way of example, the writer/speaker may seek to suppress or challenge and disagreement by prospective respondents by the use of a high status or high authority source. The use of generic, large scale collectives may have a similar rhetorical functionality. These issues will be taken up in more detail in the next set of notes.

Textual integration: insertion versus assimilation

The final issue that concerns us is that of the degree to which the attributed material is integrated or assimilated into the text itself. That is to say, we are concerned with whether there is clear separation between the words of the attributed source and the words of the text itself or whether this distinction has been blurred. To put it another way, we are concerned with whether the writer purports to offer the reader the actual words of the attributed source or whether these have been reworked in some way, often with the result that the wording is more like that of the text than that of the original speaker/writer. At its most simple, this distinction separates direct quotation (where the attributed material is clearly separated from the rest of the text) and indirect quotation (where the words of the attributed are not so clearly demarcated and where there may be considerable paraphrasing.)

Consider, for example,

example 1.

UNITS SPARK ANGER

Approval political suicide

by CATE BAILEY

A DECISION by Drummoyne Council to allow a new townhouse development at Abbotsford Point is political suicide, residents claim.

Council sparked widespread community anger last month when it approved the Great North Rd. development, despite 400 objections to the proposal.

Abbotsford Point resident Eva Flegman addressed council on December 17, telling councillors their decision would return to haunt them at the polls.

"This development with eight dwellings on a relatively narrow block is inappropriate to Abbotsford," she said.

"The density of this development is causing a great deal of anguish and distress within our community.

"We are concerned not only about the loss of character but of the deterioration of amenities and services." (The Glebe and Inner Western Weekly 8/1/97: 1)

example 2,

Taliban officials in the Afghan capital, Kabul, have accused Russia of fanning the flames of regional tension.

A foreign ministry statement released in Kabul accused Moscow of opposing positive developments and growth of central Asian countries. (Australian Associated Press 7/4/97)

In example 2, there are stretches of direct quotation where the meanings are clearly those of the external source. But what do we make of

A DECISION by Drummoyne Council to allow a new townhouse development at Abbotsford Point is political suicide, residents claim.

Council sparked widespread community anger last month when it approved the Great North Rd. development, despite 400 objections to the proposal.

Abbotsford Point resident Eva Flegman addressed council on December 17, telling councillors their decision would return to haunt them at the polls.

How certain can we be that the quoted source actually said that approving the new development would be 'political suicide', or 'would return to haunt them in the polls'? Are these the actual words of the source or are the more likely to be the formulation or paraphrase of the journalist?

We see a similar phenomenon in example 2. Once again, it is impossible to determine whether 'fanning the flames of regional tension' were the words of the quoted source of the journalist/editor.

Thus we see here that through indirect speech of this type, the distance between external and the authorial voice is reduced. There is some degree of assimilation by the text of the attributed meanings.

Such assimilation may be increased through the use of the various grammatical structures of attribution. Consider, for example,

They referred to the Minister's cowardly decision to cross the floor.

Here the claim that the Minister made a cowardly decision is being attributed to an external source, and yet, the text also, to some degree, asserts that claim itself. Thus the distinction is blurred between what the authorial voice and the external voice asserts.

This process by which there is a blurring of the distinction between the author's voice and that of the external source has, of course, been widely explored in the literature in considering the difference between what has been termed "Direct Speech", "Indirect Speech" and "Free Indirect Speech". (See, for example Simpson 1993 or Leech and Short 1981). This is one area where there are some marked differences between some registers and text types. Thus there are certain types of assimilation which occur in novelistic fiction which, for example, would seldom be found in hard-news reporting. Consider the following extract from Dickens' Little Dorrit.

As a vast fire will fill the air to a great distance with its roar, so the sacred flame which the mighty Barnacles had fanned caused the air to resound more and more with the name of Merdle. It was deposited on every lip, and carried into every ear. There never was, there never had been, there never again should be, such a man as Mr Merdle. Nobody, as aforesaid, knew what he had done; but everybody knew him to be the greatest that had appeared.

The proposition that 'there never was such a man as Mr Merdle" is, of course, attributed but substantially assimilated. The grammatical indicators of this are relatively subtle, as is often the case in such texts. Firstly, it is necessary to look back to the earlier text, to such propositions as "the sacred flame...caused the air to resound more and more with the name of Merdle" and "It was deposited on every lip, and carried on every ear" Such observation set up the possibility that subsequent utterances are material which had likewise "caused the air to resound" or has been "deposited on every lip". There is, however, one more concrete grammatical indicator of the proposition's attributed status - the use of pluperfect tense/aspect in "there never had been". Such a tense, of course, locates the saying of this utterance at a point prior to text-time, a point earlier than the "saying" or "telling" by which the authorial voice is constituted in the novel.

The Appraisal framework does not as yet provide a fully systematicised account of these and other differences in the way in which attributions can be assimilated into a text. Thus it doesn't have any categories which would directly correspond to categories such as "indirect speech" and "free indirect speech". For now, Appraisal theory would employ the notion of greater or lesser degrees of assimilation to handle the differences in intertextual positioning which are typically at stake in a shift, for example, from indirect speech to free indirect speech. This is obviously and area warranting further investigation

Overview of Attribution

Below, I provide in diagrammatic form an overview of the some of the key options for variation in attribution. When options or systems are included in curly brackets, this indicates that choices from these options will be made simultaneously or accumulatively. Thus in the diagram below, the left-most curly bracket indicates that when attributing, we must simultaneously make a choice as to endorsement AND a choice as to source type AND a choice as to textual integration. The square brackets indicate that the speaker/writer chooses between options, that is to say, just the one option must be taken up.)

Figure 3: Overview of intertextual positioning

Text analysis application: Gridlock

Below you will find what could be seen as a fairly run-of-the-mill news report. The text is worth analysing, however, for the following reasons. The report is written according to the conventions of `objectivity' which operate in the broadsheet press. That is to say, the writers are relatively consistent in not offering their own opinions, value judgements and arguments, or at least they ensure that the value judgements they do offer are not very salient. Nevertheless, despite this `objectivity', the text clearly presents a point-of-view or argument - a criticism of the government for its poor performance in transport planning and management. In this exercise we'll explore this apparent paradox. I invite you to have a look through the text and,

  1. to identify all utterances which can be seen as `attitudinal' - that is to say, involve AFFECT, JUDGEMENT or APPRECIATION. You might like to consider whether any JUDGEMENTS you identify are explicit (inscribed) or implicit ("factual" tokens which evoke, or factual tokens and non-attitudinal evaluations which provoke JUDGEMENT values). ,
  2. analyse the intertextual positioning employed by the writer - that is to say, explore how different modes of attribution are employed to enable the writers to present an argument while remaining within the conventions of journalistic objectivity (analyse the attribution in the text in terms of endorsement/disendorsement, authorial responsibility, source specification and textual integration)

(The Government referred to in the text is the State Labor Government of New South Wales. Thus the Labor sources mentioned are from within the Government itself.)

Gridlock, eight hours a day

By ROBERT WAINWRIGHT and DAMIEN MURPHY (Sydney Morning Herald - 23/3/1998)

Peak hours in Sydney have expanded from six to eight hours a day, forcing motorists on freeways and highways to crawl at 10 km/h - slower than the average jogger - a new study of the city's transport crisis has revealed.

The congestion now eats up one-third of every weekday, and even extends into weekends.

An Australian Bureau of Statistics study published this month shows that commuter use of public transport across Sydney has fallen by more than 13 per cent since 1991 while car use has jumped by 10 per cent.

Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) forecasts conclude that on present trends, travel times on city roads will become six times slower by 2016.

This bleak picture has emerged from a special two-part Herald investigation - which continues tomorrow - just weeks after the State Minister for Transport, Mr Scully, confirmed that the Government's long-awaited integrated public transport strategy had once again been delayed, this time to the end of the year.

The latest plan will become the 13th published blueprint of how to fix the city's transport woes. None has been fully implemented.

The Government now faces the prospect of an election fought on urban environmental issues, including traffic chaos and air quality.

Labor Party sources acknowledge that in marginal western Sydney seats such as Badgerys Creek, Penrith and the Blue Mountains, the Government's response to public transport problems might hold the key to its re-election strategy.

"It is three years now and there is simply no excuse," a senior ALP figure conceded. "We need a transport strategy that goes beyond just roads and some pretty big and brave decisions are needed, and now."

Transport engineers, strategists and planners say Sydney's transport crisis can be blamed directly on decades of ad hoc traffic planning and the focus of consecutive governments on the funding of new roads over public transport systems.

NRMA studies show that peak hours on main thoroughfares such as Military and Parramatta roads have increased by 30 per cent over the past decade.

...

Although the Government has set targets to reduce car use, groups such as the Total Environment Centre (TEC) and western Sydney councils say they are yet to be convinced that there are serious plans behind the political rhetoric.

The Government has pledged answers by November but a recent Department of Transport (DoT) advertisement for interest in mass-transit studies concedes that "in-principle availability" of resources for "large and complex studies" will happen only over the next year....

But community lobby groups, councils and transport experts say there is already enough information to justify full-scale plans, and they continue to appeal for money to be spent on rail and bus services in new suburbs.

Mr Les Macdonald, who recently resigned as chairman of the Public Transport Advisory Council, said he was cynical about the Government's intentions. "The Government's goals are a breakthrough but there is a distinct danger that this will be yet another very expensive public relations exercise.

"Until you pool all the government funding for transport and put it under an independent body that makes sound decisions about public transport and roads then these goals will just be used as pork barrel exercise for election time."

Professor John Black, of the University of NSW School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, agreed: "At present there are too many fingers in the pie. The lack of co-ordination that has existed historically continues, and if government is serious about transport reform, control of transportation modes, roads, planning and urban affairs should be vested in one single entity."

Text: my analysis

Key.

Underlining = attributed material
Italics
= implicit ATTITUDE
Purple
= JUDGEMENT
Green
= APPRECIATION
Pink
= AFFECT

 

Attitude

Attribution/
Sourcing

Gridlock, eight hours a day

   

Peak hours in Sydney have expanded from six to eight hours a day, forcing motorists on freeways and highways (1) to crawl at 10 km/h - slower than the average jogger - a new study of the city's transport (2) crisis has revealed.

1. implicit/provoked neg JUDGEMENT - indicates incapacity.

2. explicit neg Appreciation (of the transport situation)
Description as a whole may act to imply incompetence or wrong-doing on the part of traffic-authorities, those responsible for transport planning, etc

endorsed:
impersonal:
specific:
singular:
+status:
assimilation
notice, for example, that it's not clear whether the words such as "slower than an average jogger" and "crisis" are from the report
.

The congestion now eats up one-third of every weekday, and even extends into weekends.

neg Appreciation

? ambiguous. Is this a finding taken from the report? If so, the attribution is by a process of retrospection from the current utterance

An Australian Bureau of Statistics study published this month shows that commuter use of public transport across Sydney has fallen by more than 13 per cent since 1991 while car use has jumped by 10 per cent.

 

endorsed:
impersonal:
specific:
singular:
+status:
assimilation

Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) forecasts conclude that on present trends, travel times on city roads will become six times slower by 2016.

implicit Judgement - indicates incapacity

endorsed:
impersonal:
specific:
singular:
+status:
assimilation

This (1) bleak picture has emerged from a (2) special two-part Herald investigation - which continues tomorrow -

1. neg Appreciation
2. pos Appreciation

The bleak picture emerges from the investigation - very ambiguous as to whether these are the journalists' own findings or those of the "investigation"

just weeks after the State Minister for Transport, Mr Scully, confirmed that the Government's long-awaited integrated public transport strategy had once again been delayed, this time to the end of the year.

implicit Judgement - incompetence by the Government

endorsed:
personal:
specific:
singular:
+status:
assimilation

The latest plan will become the 13th published blueprint of how to fix the city's transport (1) woes (2) None has been fully implemented.

1. neg Affect
2. implicit Judgement - incompetence by Government

 

The Government now faces the prospect of an election fought on urban environmental issues, including traffic chaos and air quality.

   

Labor Party sources acknowledge that in marginal western Sydney seats such as Badgerys Creek, Penrith and the Blue Mountains, the Government's response to public transport problems might hold the key to its re-election strategy.

 

endorsed:
personal:
unidentified
specific:
collective:
+status:
assimilation

"It is three years now and there is simply (1) no excuse," a senior ALP figure conceded. "We need a transport strategy that goes beyond just roads and some pretty big and (2) brave decisions are needed, and now."

1. explicit neg Judgement
2. explicit pos Judgement

endorsed:
personal:
unidentified
specific:
singular:
+status:
insertion

Transport engineers, strategists and planners say Sydney's transport crisis can be (1) blamed directly on decades of (2) ad hoc traffic planning and the focus of consecutive governments on the funding of new roads over public transport systems.

1. explicit neg Judgement
2. explicit neg Judgement

endorse neutral:
personal:
unidentified
generic:
association of collectives:
+status:
insertion

NRMA studies show that peak hours on main thoroughfares such as Military and Parramatta roads have increased by 30 per cent over the past decade.

 

endorsed:
specific:
collective:
+status:
assimilation

...

   

Although the Government has set targets to reduce car use, groups such as the Total Environment Centre (TEC) and western Sydney councils say they are yet to be convinced that there are serious plans behind the political rhetoric

explicit neg Judgement - indicates that the Government is not genuine

endorse neutral:
institutional:
unidentified
specific:
collective:
+status:
assimilation

The Government has pledged answers by November but a recent Department of Transport (DoT) advertisement for interest in mass-transit studies concedes that "in-principle availability" of resources for "large and complex studies" will happen only over the next year. The advertisement, which calls for submissions by tomorrow, wants the studies to include strategic planning, technology, travel demand analysis and financial evaluation.

 

endorsed:
impersonal:
specific:
collective:
+status:
assimilation (partial insertion)

But community lobby groups, councils and transport experts say there is already enough information to justify full-scale plans, and they continue to appeal for money to be spent on rail and bus services in new suburbs.

 

endorsement neutral:
institional+ human:
generic:
association of collectives:
+status:
assimilation

Mr Les Macdonald, who recently resigned as chairman of the Public Transport Advisory Council, said he was cynical about the Government's intentions. "The Government's goals are a breakthrough but there is a distinct danger that this will be yet another very expensive public relations exercise.

explicit neg Judgement - reflects on the veracity/ commitment of the Government

endorsement neutral:
personal:
specific:
singular:
+status:
assimilation + insertion

"Until you pool all the government funding for transport and put it under an independent body that makes (1) sound decisions about public transport and roads then these goals will just be used as (2) pork barrel exercise for election time."

explicit Judgement - reflects on the ability of the transport body
2.explicit neg Judgement - indicates impropriety

endorsement neutral:
personal:
specific:
singular:
+status:
insertion

Professor John Black, of the University of NSW School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, agreed: "At present there are too many fingers in the pie. The lack of co-ordination that has existed historically continues, and if government is serious about transport reform, control of transportation modes, roads, planning and urban affairs should be vested in one single entity."

Judgement - incapacity

endorsement neutral:
personal:
specific:
singular:
+status:
insertion

[Sydney Morning Herald Monday, 23/3/1998]

A brief discussion of the evaluative positioning of the text

This analysis of attitudinal and intertextual positioning reveals the following patterns. The opening of the text (roughly the first half) confines itself to implicit JUDGEMENT which gives rise to the inference that the Government has been incompetent in its management of roads. Many of these early descriptions of the state of affairs on the road are explicitly evaluative in their use of intensifying metaphor - for example, "forcing motorists to a crawl" and "the congestion now eats up". They are not, however, explicitly Attitudinal (except in the case of a few exceptions to be discussed below). Tellingly these evocations and provocations of negative JUDGEMENT of the government are attributed, typically via impersonal sources (reports, studies, forecasts) which acquire relatively high authority by dint of their institutional connections (for example, to national traffic authorities). We note as well that almost all the attributions in the first half are authorially endorsed in some way and involve assimilation rather than insertion. Interestingly then, the authorial voice here takes responsibility, or at least shares some responsibility, for these "factual" evocations of Judgement and there is a ready blurring of the distinction between the journalists' wordings and the wordings of the attributed sources.

In the second half of the report, there is a phase shift under which explicit JUDGEMENT is introduced into the text. Telling, all such JUDGEMENT is confined to material which attributed to some external source. There are several interesting features to be observed re these attributions. The use of several identified traffic experts would appear relatively unexceptional. But we notice (a) the use of anonymous sources from within the Government itself to criticise the Government (such sources clearly having more "credibility" than Opposition sources, for example) and (b) the construction of various "associations" (in van Leeuwen's terms) in which there is no specific identification of the sources of criticisms. Thus the proposition that "Sydney's transport crisis can be blamed directly on decades of ad hoc traffic planning" is sourced to the somewhat unlikely grouping of "transport engineers, strategists and planners". Later, "community lobby groups", "councils" and "transport experts" are assembled into another grouping for the purposes of criticising the Government. We notice as well that the attribution is unendorsed and inserted (rather than endorsed and assimilated) now that that explicit JUDGEMENT is to the fore.

To summarise the pattern of evaluation development, we can say that,

  • the opening half involves the assimilation and endorsement of implied negative JUDGEMENT of the Government by specific, identified, high-authority, impersonal sources while
  • the closing half involves the insertion and non-endorsement of explicit negative JUDGEMENT of the Government by sources which include identified, high status specific human individuals, and groupings of unidentified, high status, generic collectives.

Together, then, the two halves provide for an attitudinal and ultimately rhetorical progression in which the opening half sets out "facts" and the concluding half sets out evaluative conclusions which, prepared for in this way, seem to arise naturally, logically and justifiably. The "factuality" of the opening half is enhanced, as mentioned above, by the impersonal nature of the attributional sources employed. The weight of the attitudinal evaluations which emerge in the second half is enhanced by the use of the use of groupings, as discussed, which imply the criticisms come from a diverse range of authoritative sources.

There are a couple of interesting exceptions to the rule that explicit (inscribed) Attitude should be confined to attributed material, specifically several instance of explicit APPRECIATION. Thus the "picture" which emerges from one of the cited reports is described by the authorial voice as "bleak", the newspaper's own investigation is said to "special" (admittedly such is so formulaic that it is likely to carry little evaluative weight) and the situation on the roads is said to be a "crisis".

On the basis of this analysis, we are now in a position to say little more about the linguistic constitution of mass-media "objectivity", at least to the degree that it operates in this text, and perhaps to explain how this text manages to be both argumentative and "objective". We can see that this text is "objective" to the extent that the writers offer no explicit JUDGEMENTS on their own behalf - all such are confined to attributed material. We note as well, that such explicit JUDGEMENT is typically inserted rather than assimilated and is typically non-endorsed. There was one exceptions to this rule in that the contribution of the unnamed Government source was endorsed via the verbal process verb, "concede". The system of "objectivity" operating here does not, however, seem to preclude some use of explicit APPRECIATION in the authorial voice, nor the use of metaphor and intensification to construct descriptions which strongly imply or provoke negative JUDGEMENT. Similarly, there seem to be no constraints on the assimilation, and especially not on the endorsement, of such implied JUDGEMENT. We see, therefore that the constraints on evaluative positioning imposed by the conventions of "objectivity" working here are relatively minimal, being largely confined to limitations on authorial JUDGEMENT. Consequently, see that there are plenty of evaluative resources still available by which such a text can mount an argument. (For more on this question of attitudinal meanings and different journalistic styles or voices see Iedema et al. 1994 and White 1998)

Reference List

Bernstein, B. 1970. Class, Codes, and Control. Volume 1: Theoretical Studies Towards a Sociology of Language, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Bourdieu, P. 1986. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge, Polity.

Iedema, R., S. Feez, and P.R.R. White. 1994. Media Literacy, Sydney, Disadvantaged Schools Program, NSW Department of School Education.

Leech, G.N. & Short, M. 1981. Style in Fiction, London, Longman.

Simpson, P. 1993. Language, Ideology and Point of View, London, Routledge.

van Leeuwen, T. 1996. 'The Representation of Social Actors', in Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, Caldas-Coulthard, C.R. & Coulthard, M. (eds), London, Routledge.

White, P.R.R. 1998. 'Telling Media Tales: the News Story As Rhetoric'. unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Sydney, Sydney.

Previous PageTop Of PageNext Page

Return to listing of notes in this Guide | Return to Appraisal Homepage