Martin Centre for Appliable Linguistics- Shanghai Jiao Tong University

NEWS & EVENTS

Appliable Linguistics Seminar 40
(Seminar on Language Science and System Science 106)

Time: 16:00, 31 May 2017
Venue: #304, School of Foreign Languages
Speaker: Dr. Huan Changpeng

Title: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable: Attitudinal Positioning in the aftermath of the Bangkok Blast
Abstract: Disasters especially violent deaths are not only newsworthy events that have a strong tendency to inflame emotions but also symbolic moments that inspire reflection on fundamental societal values. News coverage of disasters generally unfolds along three lines of emotion code, namely sympathy towards victims, hatred towards villains, and pride in heroes. These emotions are fundamental for audience engagement in political and public life especially in late modernity and indispensible for ultimately (re)constructing an affective community by creating solidarity among people. However, that the issues of fault and responsibilities are central to news coverage of disasters opens up a space for flows of feelings to divide as well as unify. The event of the Bangkok blast is such as a case in point where emotions in news fail to eventually unify the society but instead operate to turn the event into a blame game. To probe more fully into the nuanced rhetorical power of emotions in this event, this article utilizes the appraisal framework to examine how the Bangkok Post and the New York Times present and represent attitude of different news actors therein. Corpus findings suggest that while public grieving and mourning serve to unify the society, insufficiently mediated public hatred towards the villains, complete absence of heroes, and heightened judgement of incapacity upon Thai government serve to divide Thailand in the aftermath of the Bangkok Blast. Cultural variability in attitudinal positioning of different news actors has also been registered in the corpus. The findings are explained in relation to divergent social and ideological positioning in news production, as well as the need to attend to diversified readership.