Attitude System Realization of News Texts in Light of Appraisal Theory

the appraisal system as the path to achieving the interpersonal function of language in light of SFL.


Introduction
Considering the journalistic language of news, there are many scholars who are of the opinion that the language of news is emotionless and objective (Bhatia, 1994;Miller, 2005;Ward, 2009). However, in the context of journalistic discourse, a large proportion of what a journalist report is not action but what he calls 'talk about talk' (Bell, 1991, p. 60), such as announcements, opinions, reactions, appeals, promises, and criticisms. In other words, embeddedness is an important characteristic of newspaper language (Bednarek, 2006). Implementing the technical properties of the grammar and semantics of text, the reported speech conveys the political orientations and the intended ideologies (Fairclough, 1995). Therefore, it is the ideology of the speakers (in this sense, the news agency and the journalists) which determines the choice of words and grammatical structures to provide a detailed description of an event. Grammar, in particular, has a major role in interpreting the language phenomenon (Triyanto, 2018). Recently, there has been a shifting trend from traditional linguistic views, such as syntax, to more ideological ones concentrating on how reality is constructed in social, cultural, and political settings (Koussouhon & Dossoumou, 2015). Moreover, research in the field of language and politics has expanded enormously in recent years, and the field seems relatively young (Wodak, 2015). Derewianka and Jones (2010) juxtapose two perspectives of grammar types, namely traditional vs. functional choices. While the former emphasizes form and structure, the latter focuses on the language user's meaning or intent. In this vein, Thompson (2014) states that language is not only perceived as a system of choices that provides its users with various forms and modes of meaning to adopt a stance but may be considered as a "potential for meaning" from the Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereinafter referred to as SFL) perspective. The SFL which was initially devised by Halliday (1994), interprets the grammar functionally and foregrounds its role as a meaning-making resource through interactions in social set-ups (Halliday, 1994). Based on their view, the SFL has endeavored to merge structural information with social factors. Despite the range of approaches to SFL, one commonality is the goal to realize how evaluative assessments underlying surface text are intertwined with language and discourse. As an extension to SFL, AT aims to investigate the interpersonal meaning in discourse analysis, typically in news discourse. Therefore, appraisal theory is considered the combined application of critical discourse analysis and SFL by implementing three major sub-systems of Attitude, Engagement, and Graduation. The theory provides a comprehensive research paradigm for identifying and describing the writer's attitude toward the content of the discourse under analysis (Martin & White, 2005).
Having concentrated on the idea of judgment or in a wider scope as evaluation, it was clarified by many scholars that humanistic feelings and emotions have a pivotal role in assessing the value of "things". Of the three different areas that together constitute Appraisal Theory, the most useful tool for the analysis is the 'Attitude' framework as this is specifically intended to help assess how a speaker is emotionally disposed to the subject of the communication, how the subject of the communication is compared to the accepted norms and values, and finally how the subject creates an impact on the speaker in terms of form, appearance, and aesthetics.
As to establish a framework for mapping feelings, it is necessary to initiate the discussion with the central meaning system of Attitude which includes three semantic regions of meaning (Martin & White, 2005), namely the emotional, ethical, and aesthetic regions. The emotional region can be defined as the affective sentences accompanied by the appraiser's emotion, whether positive or negative. Mostly, these affective sentences are classified into two mental and behavioral processes involved in conveying feelings, including love, hate, jealousy, anger, hostility, and fear. In this concern, Asher, Benamara, and Mathieu (2009) used the term sentiment expression to express feelings. As the second area of meaning, judgment includes normative assessment of human behavior, which we admire, praise, or condemn (Martin & White, 2008, p. 42). In other words, the judgment contains the evaluation of objects in relation to social and personal norms (Asher, Benamara, & Mathieu, 2009). Judgments can be categorized into those concerning 'social esteem' and those signaling 'social sanction'. The former has to do with normality (how unusual a person is), capacity (capability of a person), and tenacity (how resolute a person is), whereas the latter orients to rules and regulations, which is often codified in writing such as veracity (evaluating someone's honesty), and propriety (evaluating someone's moral behavior). The last sub-system belongs to appreciative sentences that evaluate objects, processes, and states of the affair rather than human behavior. Prevalent use of this kind can be observed in political news since both events and policies are the main objects of the evaluation process.
Affect can be classified into realis and irrealis affect (Martin, 2000, p. 150). As Martin and White (2005) stated, feelings can include intention toward a stimulus. They made a distinction between the two types of feelings by stating that realis feelings pertain to those with are related to future and unrealized states, and irrealis can be addressed to the present existing feelings. Realis affect can be classified into three major categories which are related to un/happiness (misery/cheer), in/security (disquiet/ trust, confidence), dis/satisfaction (pleasure) (Martin & White, 2008, p. 49). Irrealis affect of inclination and disinclination is respectively related to desire and fear (Martin & White, 2008, p. 48).
As the second subset of Attitude, judgment is attributed to the evaluation of human behavior according to social norms and rules. The judgment system can be classified into two broad categories, namely social esteem and social sanction. Social esteem encompasses attitudinal values without legal implications. To be specific, behaviors under Social Esteem will be judged on the basis of generally accepted social expectations by which negative behaviors are discouraged, criticized, or despised as inappropriateness. According to Martin and White (2007), "Social esteem concerns norms involving normality (the state of being normal), capacity (someone's ability to do something), and tenacity (the quality or state of being tenacious and reliable",8 p. 62). "Social Sanction includes a set of rules or regulations with legal or moral implications. In other words, behaviors under social sanction will be judged on the moral ground or legal ground and negative behaviors often are condemned as sins or punished as crimes. Social Sanction comprises evaluations of human behaviors involving veracity (the quality of being honest or trust) and propriety (the quality of being socially or morally acceptable", Martin and Rose, 2007, p. 62).
Appreciation as the last sub-set of Attitude is employed to evaluate the value of "things" to human behaviors or natural phenomena. It can be classified into three sub-types, namely reaction, composition, and value. Reaction is related to assessments by reference to the degree to which the 'things' gain people's attention. It is of two sub-types, namely Impact, and Quality. Impact is about "how the 'things' attract people and Quality is about "how the 'things' satisfy people. Valuation is used to appreciate the social significance of the 'things'. It simply looks at whether the overall design works and is worthwhile. Composition is concerned with the details of the object and how easy it is to understand or use according to its balance and complexity. In addition to this, all three areas of appreciation have both a positive and negative dimension mirroring the possible positive and negative evaluations of texts, objects, and people. These three variables, in both their positive and negative manifestations, provide a strong framework for assessing and understanding the different ways in which people make judgments and evaluations.
From the perspective of AT, Ding (2017), guided by the theory of evaluation, analyzed the attitudinal resources in Obama's victory speech from the perspective of AT to discover how resources of affect, judgment, and appreciation regulate the text. The study aimed to explore how Obama used attitude resources to establish solidarity with listeners, and stir their confidence. Findings indicated that among all the resources of affect, positive resources were rather active and constituted 65.2%, while the rest amount was attributed to the inactive negative resources. It can be inferred that a great amount of positive attitudinal meanings communicate messages of hope and optimism. Among all resources of judgment, positive resources constituted a greater amount, compared to negative ones. Likewise, under the resources of appreciation, the positive resources prevailed with 87.9%, while the negative ones occupied 12.1%. Song (2019) similarly studied attitude resources in American political discourse. The findings represented the abundant use of attitudinal resources in the delivered text, among which appreciation was the most frequently employed, followed by judgment and affect, respectively. Lian (2018) analyzed President Xi's diplomatic speech made at the "Belt and Road" and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) summit to explore how appraisal resources have been used in Xi's speech to transmit Chinese voice and build Chinese discourse and contribution. It was found that among the attitudinal resources used in this text, appreciation resources accounted for the largest share which was followed by affect and judgment ones, respectively. In another study, Zhang and Pei (2018) employed AT to make a contrastive analysis between Xi's and Trump's speeches at the World Economic Forum in 2017 and 2018. The study aimed to explore how they transfer ideology and make use of language resources in their speeches to convey emotions, judgments, and appreciation. The results indicated that positive resources related to attitude are more than negative ones. In fact, they adopted a positive attitude to express their firm beliefs and views, giving the audience confidence to tackle future challenges and difficulties. It should be mentioned that the purpose of the speakers in using negative attitude words was not alike. Finally, Jin (2019) took the New York Time's report on China-Democratic People's Republic of Korea relations as an example to analyze American attitudes toward China based on the attitudinal perspective of AT. The study showed that most of the attitude resources are affect, focusing on the negative aspect followed by resources of judgment and appreciation.
With this in mind, it is of significant importance to delve into the ideologies conveyed and, in a much stronger way, imposed on people's lives, especially those related to hot news and key authorities of each society. The importance of such studies lies in raising the educated community's awareness to understand the public speakers' underlying intentions and the way they intend to make the relationship with their audiences. Therefore, the study intended to explore Trump's distribution of attitudinal resources and implementation of these resources to stir public confidence, foster national solidarity, and rally the country to the challenges ahead. Indeed, Donald Trump's speech delivered in Afghanistan, November 28, 2019 was analyzed using AT. He addressed American troops on Thanksgiving, trying to highlight their victory and power.

Corpus
To conduct the current study, a lengthy speech made by President Trump was derived from the official website of Factba.se providing users with the scripts of political speeches. The speech took place on November 28, 2019, in Afghanistan. The reason as to why this piece of news was chosen from many was the fact that political discourses are rich in evaluative structures so the author could achieve the expected purpose of the research. Speech by other presidents, such as Barak Obama, Xi Jinping, have been analyzed by other researchers, but no study has been conducted on the present speech delivered by Trump to illuminate the evaluative structures in detail.

Procedure
Data analysis took approximately two months to complete. The sample included 472 sentences to present the news, of which 17 were direct quotations. To begin the analysis, the script of the speech was subtly scrutinized based on the SFL approach while trying to give some sort of quantitative explanation as well. The speech delivered on Thanksgiving is greatly promising in strengthening the socio-political stance of the country and linguistically speaking, the pervasive use of evaluative sub-systems can influence the domineering position of the US at various levels. By employing the AT offered by Martin and White (2005) as the model of analysis, the script was analyzed sentence by sentence. In the current study, attitudinal resources, including the analysis of attitude sub-categories, were explored. To increase the reliability of the results, the chosen article was double-checked, and the consistency of classifications or reliability increased after passing about one month from the first analysis (i.e. following an intrarating procedure, rxy = 0.81).
Through analyzing the script, it was found that President Trump has used manifold opinionated lexical choices to negotiate evaluations of the troops and highrank Generals, highlighting an underlying trace of ideological orientation. He has also tried to center around the positive capabilities and great achievement of human forces and equipment by adopting evaluative-loaded items. This was one rationale for selecting the current speech for this study. The selected sample for the study could be considered as a political discourse.

Results
Comparatively, this text conveys that the predominant appraising items signal the judgment sub-system which shows the speaker's attitude towards the proposition indirectly evaluating human affairs. Numerically speaking, the intended text encompasses 123 judgment opinionated structures in the speech, whereas affect traces appeared fewer times (n = 115). Followed by the third semantic conveyer, appreciation which occupies the third position with an account for 78. Table 1 depicts the distribution and percentage of the three aspects of clause grammar reflected in the speech delivered.
Reported accounts predispose us to see the speaker's underlying intentions or purposes in a certain aspect of the dominant scene. Concerning the affect resources, the majority of the elicited items are marked as positivelyfeatured structures, while signaling satisfaction as the largest share among the other affect branches. Table 2 shows the summary of affect of Trumps' speech.
Concerning the first attitudinal resources, affect realizations are invoked by lexes which express the speaker's emotion through polarized choices. Examples shedding light on the previous description are provided in the following structures, accompanied by bolded items as guides to distinguish the border easily.
(01) I would like to take this occasion to say thank you to the Gold Star families (Satisfaction/ Pleasure)  (17) We're all very proud of the part the most featured and lethal fighting force ever assembled…(Satisfaction/ Pleasure) (18) I don't love that.... (Unhappiness/ antipathy) Having reviewed the examples above by resorting to the overt linguistically-signaled lexical items, one can notice the transparent trace of affect, which is reinforced by the very dimensions as happiness, security, and satisfaction. Affect instances can be identified by considering the directness of speech delivered by the speaker which is much associated with the appraiser's feeling. With reference to the bolded items above, it can be easily understood that the focus revolves around the emotionally-featured lexical items acting upon the present political discourse made by the speaker. What is also worth noting is the abundant use of the verb "Thank you" throughout the discourse to construct a different understanding of the power relations between the two sides. Table 3 summarizes the related instances while rendering the speaker's evenness of mind, satisfaction, and confidence.
As can be seen in Table 3, one can notice the satisfactory viewpoint of the speaker throughout the text by specifying the related sub-category out of which each instance evolves. Reviewing the instances above, happiness is the other mostly-noted branch comprised of both negative and positive hemispheres as the other affect resources. Among all resources of affect, positive resources are rather active and constitute 92.56%, while negative resources are relatively inactive and constitute 7.4%. Of the whole elicited items, the three negative branches of happiness, security, and satisfaction cover the least frequent sub-branches. Unlike the positive resources which build the hopeful and optimistic tone of the speech, negative ones help to achieve the whole communicative effect. Resources of unhappiness account for 2.96, also resources of insecurity take up the same amount of the total number, and resources of dissatisfaction comprise 1.48% of the negative resources. The first two resources of unhappiness and insecurity both constitute the largest part under the category of negative resources of affect.
(01) 2,298 American men and women in uniform who have paid the ultimate sacrifice (Social esteem/ Tenacity) (29) The extraordinary commitment and the sacrifice of your loved ones make it … (Social esteem/ Normality/ Tenacity) Compared to the first phase of distinction, among the resources of judgment, resources related to social esteem and social sanction take up 77.04%, 22.95%, respectively. Under the category of social esteem, most of the resources are resources of capacity and normality which were followed by tenacity. Regarding the mentioned instances, positive resources prevail the largest share by which U.S. and U.S. members are consistently depicted as the influential side in the course of their victory and achievements. Meanwhile, negative resources constitute the least part by which President Trump condemns any disloyalty and shortcomings by the U.S. forces. Under the category of social sanction, resources of propriety accounting for 4.1% have the least share among all judgment resources, while veracity taking up 18.85% is relatively ranked higher. It can be stated that the importance and attention given to the U.S. members are enhanced by the numerous lexical items attributed to the U.S. power and the great job which has been done.
Before making linguistic choices, to obviate the need for context and to achieve communicative purposes, communicators always make use of some linguistic expressions deliberately (Chou & Zhang, 2017). As an instance, in example 3, President Trump explicitly evaluated the behavior of the warriors by using the word "Bravest" and extended his gratitude to them.
Some adjectives and nouns which have been used to describe American members such as "extraordinary," "sacrifice," "masterful," and "courage", all convey a sense of a strong and loud voice as to highlight the U.S. authority and powerfulness. Besides, these items accentuate not only how capable and dependable are the U.S. members but emphasize to what extent their actions and behavior comply with the social norms.
Over the whole speech, the speaker used the least grammatical structures to express appreciation. The obvious distinctive aspect separating the two areas of judgment and appreciation is the matter of human cases against the objects. To the appreciative structures, objects play a significant role in determining the borderline of the semantic areas. Here, the appraiser tends to convey his positive or negative sentiment concerning the objects, or states of affairs rather than human behavior. The goal is oriented toward the 'appraised' rather than the subjective 'appraiser' which actually constitutes the major distinction The polarized representation of the power relations between the U.S. and the other party is further reinforced by zooming on objects and equipment. In this sense, lexical choices contribute to conjuring up for the reader an image of great and high-rank jobs and actions exercised by the powerful party. According to Table 4, under the category of appreciation, the positive resources prevail with a percentage of 92.08%, while negative ones constitute 7.88%. Besides, as of reaction constitutes a dominant percentage of 63.14%. Resources of valuation account for 19.75%, compared to resources of composition, with 17.09% covering the greater amount out of the total appreciation resources.
The use of some superlative and comparative adjectives color the dominant status of the U.S. Further, the repetitions of lexical choices which construct and sustain ideologies permeating the discourse delivered by Trump, will also conceptualize America as potent. To sum up, the analysis of the lexical choices and cohesion in this section demonstrate that President Trump throughout the discourse, consistently draws on specific metaphorical themes to construct U.S. respective ideologies in reporting the other party. Nouns of "Victory," and "Finest equipment," combined with the use of military terms, give a portrayal of the U.S. as the mighty side. Thus, the choices of lexes in the speech delivered which are semantically related, not only construct a puissant image of the "self" party but create a version of "reality" in a way serving their hidden intentions implicitly or explicitly.

Discussion
Evaluative language has a considerable effect on human beings' behavior and emotions toward those of their peers, events, or phenomenon. Given that emotions facilitate the interpersonal process of encoding and obtaining information (Pekrun, 2014;Tyng, Amin, Saad, & Malik, 2017), this study examined President Trump's speech in light of AT to find out the effect of attitudinal resources used in the given text.
Capitalizing on the AT, this study explicated the significance of evaluative realizations as the main gears that produce emotions and shape human judgmental behavior. Considering the nature of the discourse, it was hypothesized that the second subset of attitude, namely judgment, would play a vital role in efficiently encoding the information. Contrary to the mentioned hypothesis, this study marked affect as the most frequent sub-category in the delivered speech, followed by resources of judgment and appreciation. The result of the current research is not in line with the study conducted by Song (2019), representing abundant use of attitudinal resources in American political discourse, among which appreciation was the most frequently used resources followed by judgment and affect as the least-used ones, respectively. Likewise, the findings of a study carried out by Lian (2018) do not conform to the present research in that appreciation resources prevail the largest share followed by affect and judgment. However, the results obtained from the study by Jin (2019) are consistent with the present study findings in that it also found affect resources as the most share, which then accompanied by judgment and appreciation, respectively. Contrary to the present findings, which shed light on positive affect, in the study conducted by Jin (2019) negative affect resources have been more emphasized throughout the text due to the U.S. party's intention to construct a discourse mode for making a negative image of China. Moreover, the results of this study tie in with previous studies, such as Zhang and Pei (2018), and Ding (2017), wherein positive attitudinal resources have been more emphasized than negative ones. It should also be mentioned that along with the present study, the purpose of using negative attitude words in the study by Zhang and Pei (2018) is to represent the greatness of the U.S. achievements. Finally, the present findings are in accordance with findings reported by Ding (2017), wherein Obama delineated his optimism in welcoming a more prosperous future to his nation regardless of the U.S. challenges ahead.

Conclusion
This paper takes the appraisal system in systemic functional linguistics offered by Martin and White (2005) as the theoretical framework and analyzes the speech delivered by President Trump addressing U.S. troops on Thanksgiving, mainly from the perspective of attitude system to explore the frequency of the occurrence of its sub-sets, namely affect, judgment, and appreciation. Affect analysis of the opinionated structures underlying the surface text (discourse) reveals that throughout the speech, it was explicitly attempted to empower and justify the actions of members of us by emotionalizing those tasks while conjuring up to the reader" mind a specific perception of dominant status and power occupied by the U.S. Having reviewed the judgment aspect, the speaker has tried to illustrate a positive evaluation of the U.S. soldiers and the high-rank generals' actions and bravery. A powerful image of the U.S. party consistently was constructed by the deliberate interplay of key lexical items, as the use of 'Iron Soldiers'. Furthermore, through appreciating the equipment and relative assessment of the inner group members' job, President Trump has aimed to attribute the final victory to 'us', while belittling the 'other' party by expressing their weak performance. Textual analysis of the current discourse signals the multifunctionality and multidimensionality of political speech. The specific linguistic choices as being expressive and constructive of the polarized positions of the two parties confirm the former claim. Such a detailed analysis predisposes us to a particular version of reality as being reported by the speaker through the usage of various grammatical structures that embody a favorable ideological understanding and consequences. The covert representation of the grammatical structures seeping through the surface text gives insights into some intended ideological orientation made by the language user. It is hoped that this paper will indicate the future direction in political news content analysis in light of appraisal subsystems being utilized.

Competing interests
The author declared no competing interests.

Funding
This research was not financially funded.