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,
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)
