Peter Robert Rupert White

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of the Arts and Media

Exploring the relationship between theory and practice in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this volume offers a state-of-the-art overview of Appliable Linguistics. Featuring both internationally-renowned scholars and rising stars from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Indonesia, New Zealand, Singapore and the USA, Appliab...

Persuasivenes, dialogistic positioning and the putative (ideal, imagined, virtual etc.) reader

This study explores the strategic use of resources for conveying attitudinal assessments by journalists when their communicative options are seriously curtailed—when there are severe social, legal, or political constraints on what they can say about powerful people and institutions. It offers, by way of a case study, an analysis of editorials publi...

This paper is a contribution to appraisal-based scholarship concerned with the discursive performance of what is variously termed 'identity' or 'persona'-specifically the scholarship which proposes that key aspects of textual identity/persona can be related to tendencies in speakers' i deployment of the resources for conveying evaluative meanings....

The notion that ' monologic' written texts construe for themselves a putative addressee (variously termed the ' ideal ' , ' imagined ' , ' virtual ' , ' intended ' , ' model ' or ' mock ' reader) has received a great deal of scholarly attention, initially by scholars of literary fiction and subsequently by discourse analysts more generally. This pa...

This article explores a framework for analyses of what has variously been termed the ‘implied’, ‘imagined’, ‘virtual’ or ‘putative’ reader/addressee – the effect by which ostensibly ‘monologic’ texts, such as news media commentary, political pronouncements and academic essays project particular attitudes, beliefs and expectations on to the reader/a...

This study investigates the representations of the Syrian refugee crisis in commentary articles published in two British newspapers with different political orientations, The Guardian and The Telegraph. The study draws on the appraisal model as a linguistic tool to analyse the attitudinal language of the articles indicative of the stances adopted b...

This paper considers issues related to the textual organization of university lectures and the degree to which they are comprised of conventionalized text-organizational schema or genre stagings. It utilizes a dataset of video recordings and transcripts of four social science lectures which were delivered by two lecturers at a university in Japan i...

There is virtually universal acceptance in the discourse-analysis literature that the stylistic and text-organisational properties of texts are conditioned by the social contexts in which they operate and the communicative purposes which they serve. This paper provides some new insights into this nexus between context and text via a report of a stu...

There is virtually universal acceptance in the discourse-analysis literature that the stylistic and text-organisational properties of texts are conditioned by the social contexts in which they operate and the communicative purposes which they serve. This paper provides some new insights into this nexus between context and text via a report of a stu...

p>Given the importance of disciplinary specificity in terms of the potential differences in the functionality of nominalizations in scientific textbooks and the dearth of studies of this type, the current study explores the extent to which nominalization is realized across two disciplines. To this aim, eight academic textbooks from Physics and Appl...

For the past eight years, Australian school students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 have engaged in the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) writing test, with a one-in-two chance they will be tasked with producing a 'narrative' genre. This paper examines the way in which the very notion of storytelling and narrative is conceptualis...

This paper contributes to what appears to be an increasing interest in interpersonal meanings in translation studies scholarship (e.g., Munday 2012; 2015). Specifically it attends to the observed tendency in audiovisual translation (e.g., Díaz Cintas 2013) for the interpersonal elements commonly termed “interjections” (and “minor clauses” in the sy...

This paper demonstrates insights arising when some key aspects of systemic functional linguistic theory (Halliday 19994) and the appraisal framework (Martin and White 2005) are applied to exploring variation between multiple translations of the same source text. For the purposes of this demonstration, an investigation is conducted by reference to t...

This paper is concerned with the nature of storytelling and how different types of story or narrative might be classified and characterised by reference to their generic structures and ultimate social functions. More specifically, it is concerned with Persian/Farsi-language reports of crimes in Iranian newspapers. It describes and analyses the vari...

http://www.degruyter.com/view/books/9783110255478/9783110255478-006/9783110255478-006.xml This chapter evaluates recent scholarship concerned with the analysis of language interpreted as expressing evaluative meanings. It critiques work undertaken within semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and corpus linguistics and makes new connections wit...

This chapter addresses the issue of pedagogy and bilingual/multilingual education: how best to match teaching-and-learning approaches to the literacy development needs of students in multilingual educational settings. More specifically, it makes the case for what is known as the ‘Sydney school’ genre-based literacy development approach. It argues t...

This paper seeks to contribute to the scholarship which is interested in the rhetorical, axiological workings of what are sometimes termed ‘hard news’ or ‘objective’ news stories—a style of news journalism typically associated with the ‘quality’ or ‘broadsheet’ news media and involving a regime of ‘strategic ‘impersonalisation’. It is interested in...

This paper outlines a methodology for operationalizing Bakhtin’s widely influential notion that all texts, whether spoken or written, are ultimately dialogic. More specifically it outlines an analytical methodology for accounting for the dialogic workings of written, mass-communicative texts which advance a viewpoint or argue a case. It is proposed...

This paper is concerned with comparisons of the language of hard news reporting across languages and cultures. Within English-language journalism, authorial “neutrality” and use of the “inverted pyramid” structure are frequently seen to be distinctive features of the modern hard news report and one of the grounds by which journalists assert the “ob...

This paper is concerned with comparisons of the language of hard news reporting across languages and cultures. Within English-language journalism, authorial “neutrality” and use of the “inverted pyramid” structure are frequently seen to be distinctive features of the modern hard news report and one of the grounds by which journalists assert the “ob...

The Asahi newspaper is the second-most-read national broadsheet newspaper in Japan and is considered left-wing and anti-American (Komori et al. 2002). The Nihon Keizai newspaper is a broadsheet which specializes in the economy and is motivated by economic imperatives. In this study, one front-page lead story from the Asahi and one from the Nihon Ke...

The aim of this paper is to examine to what extent taken-for-grantedness is used as a strategy in political media language as a genre across cultures, and whether it is characterised by similar choices at the interpersonal level. The data are taken from British, Flemish and Swedish radio and television interviews and debates. Starting from a close...

This is the first comprehensive account of the Appraisal Framework. The underlying linguistic theory is explained and justified, and the application of this flexible tool, which has been applied to a wide variety of text and discourse analysis issues, is demonstrated throughout by sample text analyses from a range of registers, genres and fields.

In this chapter we will demonstrate some of the ways in which appraisal systems can be used to inform our interpretation of evaluation in text. In particular we are concerned here with the interaction of attitude, engagement and graduation in relation to the social context variable tenor. We will also comment on the interaction between appraisal an...

In this chapter we outline a framework for mapping feelings as they are construed in English texts, referring to this system of meanings as attitude. This system involves three semantic regions covering what is traditionally referred to as emotion, ethics and aesthetics. Emotion is arguably at the heart of these regions since it is the expressive r...

Our purpose in previous chapters has been to provide a general account of the resources of evaluation and intersubjective positioning as these operate within English. In this chapter we shift from this global perspective to a more local one. We are concerned with patterns in the use of evaluative resources within texts by which certain types of eva...

This chapter is concerned with the linguistic resources by which speakers/ writers adopt a stance towards to the value positions being referenced by the text and with respect to those they address. The chapter provides a framework for characterising the different possibilities for this stance-taking which are made available by the language, for inv...

This article offers a framework for analysing the linguistic resources of intersubjective positioning, meanings which have elsewhere been treated under such headings as modality, polarity, evidentiality, hedging, conces-sion, intensification, attribution and consequentiality. Drawing inspiration from Bakhtin/Vološinov's dialogic perspective, it pro...

The thesis explores the rhetorical properties of the modern news report. In order to account for the distinctive style of news reporting it extends Systemic Functional Linguistic theories of the interpersonal to develop new analyses of the semantics of attitude, evaluation and inter-subjective positioning. It applies these analyses to identify thre...

The extract is taken from a chapter which firstly sets out an account of the primary genres/sub-genres of journalistic discourse and then goes on to explore registerial variations associated with the different journalistic roles of 'reporter', 'correspondent' and 'commentator'. Here I have included: Section A: An account of some of the key argument...