The linguistic expression of "Brexit" in the British news media: A corpus-assisted analysis

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DIPARTIMENTO DI

FILOLOGIA, LETTERATURA E LINGUISTICA

CORSO DI LAUREA IN LINGUE E LETTERATURE

MODERNE EUROAMERICANE

TESI DI LAUREA

The linguistic expression of “Brexit” in the British news media: A

corpus-assisted analysis

CANDIDATO

RELATORE

Marco Biancardi

Chiar.ma Prof.ssa Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

If someone, especially my dear friend and colleague Alice, had asked me to write my thesis on a linguistic topic I would probably have answered “Don’t make me laugh!” as I only developed my interests in linguistics recently. Fortunately, things like people change continually. I had the fortune to make acquaintances that really helped me to grow academically and personally. I owe most of this growth to my experiences abroad, particularly the year I spent in the UK. For this reason, I would like to thank personally each person who directly or indirectly made me a better person, more curious regarding foreign issues and happy to share experiences and opinions with everyone. I encountered people who were spontaneously kind (for the sake of being kind and not guided by interests of any nature). I never doubted their passion, attention to ethics and morality. Thank you my friends, I hope our paths will never be apart.

I want to thank the most important person in my life, my mother. She is always an example of how people should behave, live, and work, always giving 120% in everything. I hope one day I will be half as good as her. My whole family as well, my father, my grandparents, for teaching me so many important lessons that unfortunately I cannot list here.

At last, but not at least, a special thanks to prof. Crawford Camiciottoli, for her guidance, suggestions, and her incessant commitment. The structure, topic, and her knowledge of the topic helped me in many different ways. If I was able to write this thesis, it is thanks to all of these people. Therefore, even though words are often unnecessary, I hope, as the old Latin saying “Verba volant, Scripta manent”, that this study will always be an imperishable memory of their deeds and my appreciation.

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List of tables:

Table 1 – The appraisal model (adapted from Martin and White, 2005). 8

Table 2 – News values summary. 27

Table 3 – A comparison between Bell’s and Bednarek’s categories. 28

Table 4 – The Appraisal model. 33

Table 5 – Explicit vs. Implicit Attitude. 34 Table 6 – Three sub-categories of Attitude. 35 Table 7 – Examples of the articulations of affect. 36 Table 8 – different coding for “skill”. 40 Table 9 – example of overlapping with disgust. 41 Table 10 – News sources in the BBNC. 48

Table 11- Describing BBNC. 51

Table 12 – Antconc features. 54

Table 13 – The Brexit glossary. 59

Table 14 – Examples of Affect. 62

Table 15 – Occurrences of lexical items expressing affect in BBNC. 65 Table 16 – Examples of Judgement. 65 Table 17 – Occurrences of verbs that express mental processes in BBNC. 69 Table 18 – Examples of Appreciation. 72

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List of figures:

Figure 1 – The two opposite factions and their leaders. 47 Figure 2 – Example of the organisation of news articles in BBNC. 50 Figure 3 – The three main folders of BBNC. 52 Figure 4 – Sample of word list of BBNC. 57 Figure 5 – Searching adverbs in the corpus. 70

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1. CHAPTER 1 –

BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT OF THE

STUDY

1.1 Prologue

On Thursday, 23rd June you will have the opportunity to decide if the United Kingdom remains in the European Union. It is a big decision. One that will affect you, your family and your children for decades to come.

This was the opening article regarding the EU referendum published by the UK government. Brexit has an important role as it is a contemporary topic discussed by news press and politics in all the countries of the EU. In particular, it is interesting on many levels. Firstly, it is the first time that the EU must cope with the withdrawal of a country that belongs to the Union. Secondly, the language of Brexit, is a new field in European politics, as in the near future agreements of various aspects will be discussed, starting from Article 501, by which a member of the EU can request its withdrawal from the European Union, and the trade agreements between the UK and the rest of the EU. Moreover, some constituents of the UK (Scotland, Gibraltar, and Northern Ireland) expressed disapproval, questioning their own membership in the UK. Thus, I chose this topic for its many interesting aspects, and I believe that this study will provide some interesting results. However, before starting to investigate the details of the various topics of my thesis, I believe that a brief introduction about Brexit and the main protagonists of the EU referendum is compulsory.

1.1.1 Brexit chronology

1_{All information regarding the article 50 are retrieved from the official website of the Lisbon}

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Despite being a common expression and a frequent topic in everyday news, there are some points that need to be clarified. The term “Brexit” is a combination of two words “British” and “exit”. According to Oxford English Dictionary it was firstly coined by Peter Wilding2_{(who paradoxically}

campaigned for the UK to Remain in the EU), inspired by the word “Grexit” (a term applied to the Greek crisis). The EU referendum became unavoidable when trade, immigration, financial and labour regulation, and social spending were regarded as national issues, and political parties such as the anti-immigration, anti-EU UK Independence Party gained support. Another important topic of Brexit news is the Lisbon treaty’s Article 50.Eventually, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal and taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. The UK has been one of the prominent countries of the EU. Despite its role however, its membership has always been challenged. The UK has been a member of the EU since 1973, for a period of more than 43 years.3

1973

2016

EEC Membership

BREXIT

Since the first EU agreement which dates back to 1973 by which the UK entered the EEC (European Economic Community), there has been more than one referendum proposal concerning EU membership. In 1975 for instance, a referendum was held with 67% of British citizens voting to stay in. After ten years, the Labour party promoted in their manifesto a negotiation to withdraw

2_{P. Wilding is the founder of and director of British Influence, former head of media for the}

Conservative party in the European parliament, and European director of BskyB.

3_{I will consider the EU referendum as the breaking point when the UK leaves officially the}

EU. This consideration is merely in the interest of this study, as it is an ongoing process that will take more than two years to enact.

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from the EU “within the lifetime”, but the Labour party lost the election. In the 90s, a businessman launched another campaign for a public vote on the UK’s membership of the EU. In 1999, the UK opted to maintain the pound instead of the European coin “Euro”. After less than ten years, a cross-party which sought the UK’s withdrawal from the EU was launched. Another time in 2008, a call for an “in-out” referendum was made. The next year, the UK Independence Party came in second in the European Parliament elections, and at the core of its programme was the EU referendum. In 2013, in a long-awaited speech Prime Minister David Cameron said that if the Conservatives won the following election they would seek to renegotiate the UK's relationship with the EU and then give the British people the "simple choice" in 2017 between staying in the EU under those terms or leaving the EU. In 2015, the Conservatives won a majority in the House of Commons in the general election and immediately pledged to maintain their election manifesto promise to hold a referendum on the UK's membership of the EU by the end of 2017.

1.1.2 Brief introduction to the protagonists of Brexit

An important aspect of this thesis is the choice of the protagonists of the news media which provides the linguistic data for my study. For this reason, a brief introduction to each of the most important “actors” of Brexit is crucial in order to define why they have been selected. The first challenging issue is that Theresa May might not represent the Leave movement as she never openly campaigned for it. However, my study is based on news perspective, therefore it was necessary to find two candidates that shared a common level of importance. After a long consideration, I decided that the most suitable protagonists were former PM David Cameron and PM Theresa May. This choice was dictated mainly by the quantity of textual news I collected. First, I had to collect enough material, and then divide the articles in two factions according to their position: Leave and Remain. After considering many interesting protagonists (such as Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson among

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others), I selected PM Theresa May for her prominent role in news media over the last year. Hereafter, I will provide a brief introduction to David Cameron, Theresa May, Nigel Farage, and Boris Johnson, as the four protagonists of the study.

1.1.2.1 David Cameron

David Cameron will always be remembered as the man who took the UK out the EU, despite having campaigned for the Remain side. He led the Conservative party for nearly 11 years (only Stanley Baldwin, Lady Thatcher and Sir Winston Churchill spent a longer time as leaders of the party). He gained power in 2005, promoting himself as a new kind of Conservative: young, liberal-minded and socially concerned. Mr Cameron, born in London 1966, was an atypical conservative leader having attended one of Britain’s most prestigious private schools, Eton. Moreover, he has royal ancestry that can be traced back to William IV, making him a distant relative of the Queen. Even though he never won over the powerful right wing in his party, who always mistrusted his liberal Conservatism and his elitist style of government, he at least succeeded in recruiting more women and ethnic minority MPs. However, his decision to settle the issue of Europe once and for all eventually led the ex-PM to his resignation.

1.1.2.2 Theresa May

Theresa May, born in 1956 in Sussex, lost both her parents in the 80s. She began her political career becoming a councillor in the London Borough of Merton from 1986 to 1994. In 1997, she headed to Westminster as MP for Maidenhead. In 2002, she became the first female chairman of the Conservatives. In 2010-2012, she was minister for Women and Equalities, and from 2010-2016, home secretary. In 2016, she replaced former PM David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party and prime minister. With the EU referendum which David

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Cameron called and lost, and his subsequent resignation, Mrs May emerged as the "unity" candidate to succeed him. Regarding Brexit, she stated that there will be no second referendum. She asserted that a deal is needed to trade with the EU in goods and services, but more control is needed to lower immigration. She later added that the period of Brexit will not define her time in office and she promised a radical programme of reform.

1.1.2.3 Nigel Farage

With his slogan “I want my country back”, Nigel Farage helped UKIP (the UK Independence Party) to become the third biggest party in UK politics in terms of votes in the 2015 general election, and he helped persuade more than 17 million people to vote to leave the EU. The Eurosceptic was born in 1964 in Kent and his "man in the pub" image and disdain for political correctness left him free to attack rivals for being mechanical and overly on-message. In 1993, he was a founder of the party UKIP and in 2006 he became leader of the party. In 2014, he led UKIP to largest share of vote in the European election. After the EU referendum result, he announced his resignation as leader of the UKIP.

1.1.2.4 Boris Johnson

Boris Johnson was born in 1964 was former mayor of London, and now is Foreign Secretary. For a period of time he worked as journalist for The Times, The Telegraph, and in 1999, he became editor of the Spectator magazine before standing as an MP in 2001. Johnson was the favourite to take over the Conservative leadership after backing Brexit. However, as Michael Gove broke away from supporting him, he lost the possibility to become Britain’s PM.

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The impetus for this study, a corpus-based analysis of the linguistic strategies used both by media and politicians on the specific subject of Brexit, originates from a personal experience and an academic interest that date back to 2015. At that time, I was living in the UK and I began to consider moving once and for all to England. Thus, I began considering the economic and political factors that I had to take into account. During that period, I encountered for the first time the word “Brexit”. and started developing an eager interest in the topic. My main focus and aim was based on the simple question: “What will happen to me if the UK leaves Europe?”.

During that period, I was living in Leicester, East Midlands, attending the University of Leicester as an exchange student. The city, which has a conspicuous number of immigrants and second-generation British citizens, provided me with an inner perspective about Brexit from the point of view of those who wanted to stay in Europe. More specifically, a research study carried out on the city’s migrant population published in the city newspaper Leicester Mercury revealed that Leicester's migrant population has increased by 71.7 per cent in the last 10 years. According to Dr Carlos Vargas-Silva, the senior researcher leading the Census project, “residents born in India represent the most numerous non-UK-born group in Leicester (37,224 residents, 34 per cent of Leicester's foreign-born), followed by residents born in Kenya (7,118; 3.3 per cent); Poland (6,417; 2.9 per cent); Pakistan (3,534; 1.6 per cent), and Zimbabwe (3,377; 1.5 per cent).”

Thus, the environment in which my interest on the topic grew was deeply influenced by a particular perspective and, as I am an Italian citizen, I immediately sympathized with the “Remain” faction. At the end of the exchange period, I soon started to seriously evaluate how I would have been able to move to England and then, as Brexit took place, I grew more and more interested in the fate of my fellow EU citizens that currently live in England, or want to move there.

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My academic career helped me to approach the subject in a scientific (more precisely linguistic) perspective. When I moved back to Italy, I read every article and interview I could and developed an awareness about which faction each newspaper supported. At that point, I decided to share my interest with a former professor of my home university, prof. B. Crawford Camiciottoli, who encouraged me to develop a linguistic approach to the topic and suggested some specific readings. More specifically she advised me to read about the appraisal framework, i.e., a model adopted by James R. Martin and Peter R.R. White (2005), different works by Allan Bell (1991, 1995), Monika Bednarek (2012, 2015), and Teun A. Van Dijk (1983, 1988, 1998, 1999, 2002) relating to media and political discourse. I spent the first months doing research about the subject and developing my own point of view regarding this matter.4

1.3 Analytical framework

The analytical framework I opted for in this particular kind of analysis is based on the concept of evaluative language, or more specifically, the appraisal model developed by Martin and White (2005), Describing this framework, Crawford Camiciottoli asserts:

the strong interpersonal focus of this model renders it well suited to an investigation of the rhetorical dimension of communication to shed light on how interlocutors assume positions with the aim of influencing others. (p. 46)

Martin and White use the term Appraisal to refer to “the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positionings” (White: 2001). Martin and White’s model (2005) divides appraisal into three interacting domains: attitude, engagement, and graduation, which I will indicate in table 1:

4_{All books and academic articles are cited in the following chapters and at the end of my thesis}

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APPRAISAL

Attitude Engagement Graduation

Affect Dialogic positioning Force Judgement • Disclaiming • Raise

Appreciation • Proclaiming • Lower • Entertaining Focus

• Attributing • Sharpen • Soften

Table 1 – The appraisal model (adapted from Martin and White, 2005).

As can be seen in the table above, each of these domains is further divided into different sub-categories. Attitude, which concerns emotional reactions, judgements of behaviour and evaluations of things, is divided into: affect, judgement, and appreciation. Engagement concerns the interplay between different voices around opinions in discourse. Therefore, it has to do with how speakers and writers acknowledge what others have previously expressed, what they assume others may believe or how they expect others to respond. It can be divided into disclaiming, proclaiming, entertaining, and attributing. Graduation refers to gradability of evaluation whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred, and thus has to do with the upscaling or downscaling of evaluation. It is divided into force and focus. This topic will be further analysed in Chapter four.

1.4 Conclusion

At the end of the research, this study will provide some insights into the strategies adopted by the English media regarding Brexit. This topic is, in my opinion, an important one for political and media discourse. I believe that what

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is happening in the UK after Brexit is extremely important for two main reasons. Firstly, it will change the role of England in Europe and that of the EU in the world. Secondly, for a linguistic analysis, the fact that this is a topic in progress and still on-going is a perfect opportunity to study and analyse media discourse. Moreover, I believe that political language in media is a topic with a key role in everyday life. Therefore, it is important to analyse how is structured and developed, in order to understand the processes which are implied by reporters and politicians. In this period of changes and social anxieties and tensions, reading through news and developing one’s own perspective is of vital importance.

1.5 Structure of the thesis

Following this introductory chapter, in Chapter 2 I will introduce political discourse and ideology drawing mostly on Van Dijk (1983: 1988: 1998: 1999: 2002). In chapter 3 I will focus my attention on news media and provide an explanation regarding the role of journalists, editing, and introducing topics related to news drawing from the work of Bell (1991). In chapter 4 I will investigate the appraisal model proposed by Martin and White (2005). In chapter 5 I will provide a closer look to the methodology I followed for the analysis. Chapter 6 is dedicated to the analysis of the corpus, and therefore, I will deploy the appraisal model to analyse Brexit language. Finally, in the last chapter I will propose the most relevant findings of this study. At the end of the study, I will provide an appendix with the list of the articles I selected.

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2. CHAPTER 2 – POLITICAL DISCOURSE AND

IDEOLOGY

2.1 Introduction

There are many kinds of discourse, but political discourse is one of the main topics of this study and has been thoroughly analysed by T. A. van Dijk in many of his works. The author defines political discourse as ideological. Later in his study Van Dijk (2002: 1) proposes some general properties of ideologies which he defines as “forms of social cognition and their relations to political text and talk”. Van Dijk wonders whether ideology in political discourse varies from other foms of discourse, starting by defining how ideology can be described. He formulates, citing from one his previous works (Van Dijk, 1998), that “ideologies are the basis of the social representations of groups”. He interprets social representations as ‘any kind of socially shared mental representation’, shifting from Farr Moscovici (1984) and his followers who believe that social representation is a narrower phenomenon (Van Dijk, 2002).

Van Dijk (2002) further affirms that when focusing on politicians there are at least two ideologies that are likely to combine in the discourse. This first refers to professional ideologies, that concern the function as politician as a profession in itself, while the second, the socio-political ideologies that concern the adhesion to a specific party or social group such as “conservative and progressive politicians, socialists and neoliberals, Christian-democrats, greens, nationalists and racists, and so on” (Van Dijk, 2002). In his work on ideology (Van Dijk, 2002) he supplies a list of the principles of his approach:

a) Ideologies are systems of beliefs.

b) They are shared by members of a social group.

c) Groups also share other beliefs, such as knowledge and attitudes. d) The beliefs shared by a group are defined as “social representations”.

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e) Ideologies are the organizing, “basic” beliefs of these social representations.

f) Groups not only have their “own”, ideologically based, “knowledge” (often called “beliefs” by other groups), but also share in more general, consensual, culturally shared knowledge, which may be called (cultural) “common ground”.

g) This cultural common ground may be seen as the foundation of all cognition, across and between different groups, and thus is also presupposed by different ideologies.

h) Common ground may be empirically assessed as all beliefs that are presupposed in public discourse. This means that, for a given culture, such common ground is non-controversial, commonsensical, and hence non-ideological.

i) At the core of the common ground are also the general norms and values shared by the members of a culture.

j) Groups select some of these cultural values and organize them in their own ideologies, e.g., freedom, equality, justice or objectivity.

k) Ideologies probably have a canonical structure that facilitates their acquisition, use and change.

l) Yet it is not known what this structure might be, it is probably related to the basic social properties of a group, such as the criteria of group membership, activities, aims, norms and values, relations to other groups, and specific group resources (or lack thereof) —or “capital”. m) Ideologies and their structures may also be seen as the cognitive core of

the identity of a group and its members, that is, as a social self-schema of a group.

n) Ideologies and the social representations organized by them control the social practices of actors as group members.

This given formulation presupposes cultural beliefs which are made of different groups (e.g. feminists and male chauvinists both presuppose that

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group members know what men and women are). Moreover, discourse presupposes a common ground to be interpreted as broad and cultural in order for everybody to understand and cooperate one another.

2.2 Mental models

According to Van Dijk (2002), ideologies and other social representations control discourse and other social practices of group members. Social actors and speakers possess an individual psychology of personal beliefs; besides, they share a social psychology of group beliefs. Political discourse may express group ideologies and other beliefs, especially in collective forms of text and talk such as party platforms. However, political discourse is often produced by individual speakers that tend to personalise the group beliefs. This process underlies the particular properties of political discourse, related to the need for a cognitive interface that stands between social beliefs and discourse, and represents personal beliefs, opinions, and experiences. Mental models, (Johnson-Laird 1983; Van Dijk and Kintsch 1983; Van Oostendorp and Goldman 1999), which are personal representations (“episodic memory”) of specific events that people witness, experience, or hear. These representations of events imply a personal knowledge, but also opinions about the event. Thus, what is usually called “experience” simultaneously incorporates personal interpretations and evaluations of the mentioned event. Therefore, these personal models may be socially biased. For instance, a politician can have a conservative interpretation of a political event. As can be seen, the content of these models is obtained from both general and social beliefs, and for the same reason, from ideologies.

Therefore, according to Van Dijk (2002), mental models are an interface that stands between social beliefs and discourse. When we acknowledge an event, we are using indeed a cognitive basis of the discourse production or, alternatively, the comprehension process, that is represented by mental models.

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At this point, it can be asserted that when a speaker is producing a discourse, he/she automatically includes contextually relevant propositions that come directly from her/his mental models. The very structure of this model influences the structure of the discourse. High level propositions may be selected as macro-propositions (topics) of the text, and the same is true for the setting (time, location), participants and their attributes, actions, etc. that define the model.

2.3 Context models

Before applying the framework proposed by Van Dijk (2002) to political discourse, it is necessary to analyse another important aspect of his study. Indeed, as the author asserts:

Speech participants not only have mental models of events they talk about (and that are the basis of the meaning of their discourse), but also mental models of the event in which they participate as speakers and recipients. (2002: 18)

To put it simply, a person possesses a subjective representation which is possibly ideologically biased. This is called context models by Van Dijk (2002). The author explains that contexts are derived from personal mental constructs and interpretations of a communicative event. Thus, every participant’s experience may result in slightly different interpretations (this phenomenon often gives rise to communicative conflicts) which lead to different context models. These models, that control the discourse production and understanding, outline what functions a discourse has, and what knowledge and other beliefs the participants possess, in general, how the structures of discourse are adapted to the social situation in which it is performed. Through context models it is possible to define the relevant information of a communicative act. That is, the theory of context models provides a cognitive theory of relevance. Their control of discourse operates at all levels, they tell the language users which relevant propositions to select in event models, what

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speech act to realize and what the conditions of the speech act are, what politeness forms to choose, what style characteristics to select, and so on, until the very intonation of spoken discourse.

Context models possess specific categories regulated for communicative events, such as social domain (e.g., politics), the accomplishment of social action (e.g., legislation), setting (e.g., time, space), the roles of participants (e.g., communicative, social roles), and cognitions (e.g., aims, opinions, beliefs). These models may be ideologically biased. If two members of different political parties discuss an issue, they have ideologically based mental models regarding the issue (e.g., immigration); they also possess mental models about the setting, aim, the interaction, and about each other as well. Context models may influence discourse in many aspects. If, for instance, one of the two speakers formulate his/her opinion built on an ideology that is anti-racist, the hearer may find this expression racist instead.

2.4 Political discourse

Political discourse involves a class of genres defined by a social domain, namely that of politics (Van Dijk, 2002). In the same way, scientific discourse, educational discourse, and legal discourse represent the classes of discourse genres of the domains of science, education, and law. For this reason, government deliberations, parliamentary debates, party programs, and speeches by politicians, are among the many genres that belong to the domain of politics. It can be seen that there are many definitions of “politics”. For this reason, defining its domain is an arduous task, as the boundaries are often fuzzy.

Van Dijk (2002) concentrates specifically on the discourse of politicians (which is by some means the same aspect I will focus in my study), thus avoiding those discourses which may be influenced by politics but belong to other social domains, (e.g., a student demonstration, an anti-abortion campaign,

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or simply an everyday conversation about a political matter). Therefore, the range of political discourse here considered regards “professional politicians” that produce discourses only in an institutional setting such as governments, parliaments or political parties. As Van Dijk asserts in:

In a more action-oriented way, we may also say that discourse is political when it accomplishes a political act in a political institution, such as governing, legislation, electoral campaigning, and so on. (2002:20)

2.4.1 Investigating political genres

Having defined the bounds of political discourse, it is necessary to describe the genres that belong to that domain as well. Van Dijk (2002) tried to define these genres by looking for specific properties, for instance, debates in parliaments.5 He asserts that such debates can regard virtually any social topic. The only restriction given is that these events usually concern the public sphere, more specifically, the events that require collective decision making, policies, regulation, or legislation. Regarding lexical choice, it is not particularly distinctive, as there is a sort of general formality constraint, and only few words that are specifically used by politicians (although shared with the bureaucracies such as ministries, government agencies, etc.). There are a few ritual formulas as well for addressing or speaking about other MPs, or the chair. However, they are not enough to define the genre by themselves. It can be seen that the format of political debates shares the same path as other debates, as it is unlikely that politicians would only follow the interactional and argumentational categories and rules that belong to their category. Van Dijk exemplifies this concept by asserting that a political debate is not different from an annual stockholder meeting of a big corporation, or any other institutional or organizational

5_{Van Dijk (2002) provide a detailed exploration of debates in parliament. I believe that most}

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meeting, where a strict time schedule and turn allocation by the chair is prominent.

2.4.2 The contextual level of political discourse

By the definition given previously, that is that political discourse refers to genres used by professional politicians who perform their role producing discourse in a political institution, Van Dijk (2002) concludes that genre description should not take place at the text level, but rather at a context level. For this reason, he provides a precise scheme about parliamentary debate which is primarily defined by participants who are MPs, and that generally takes place in an institution, such as the parliament. Then he adds that there is a political act of legislation accomplished by the debate in itself. Finally, the consequences of the mentioned debate are defined by the terms of political decision making, (laws, policies, elections, etc.). Van Dijk (2002) provides other characteristics of contextual categories, that are:

a) Domain: politics

b) The act being fulfilled: legislation, policy mailing, etc. c) Settings: House of Parliament, session of parliament, etc. d) The political acts: Tabling a motion, “doing” opposition, etc.

e) The roles of the participants: MP, representative, party member, member of the opposition, etc.

f) The political cognitions of the participants: Political beliefs and ideologies, aims and objectives, etc.

This schema defines the structure of the communicative events that participants follow in their context models. However, it is important to underline that the nature of political acts (debates, speeches, meetings, campaigns, advertising, etc.) is not defined by certain structural properties of the text, but by the text’s context characteristics. Despite this premise, Van Dijk

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(2002) confirms that it is important to study the structures of political discourse, such as the topics, topoi, coherence, arguments, lexical style, disclaimers and rhetorical features, like metaphors, euphemism, and hyperbole. This analysis allows inferences about the cognitive, social, and various political functions of political discourse.

2.5 Politics and ideology

Politics is the natural social domain of ideologies. However, it is often confusing to refer to ideologies as a distinction between other ideologies and political ideologies (such as communism, fascism, socialism, liberalism, or green politics) exists. The definition provided by Van Dijk (2002: 1998) also applies to other ideologies, (such as feminism, ecology, racism) that can be expressed in political discourse. Therefore, politicians enact their multiple ideological identities, as they speak primarily as politicians, but also as conservatives (or other groups such as liberals, for instance), men/women, racists/anti-racists, and so on. Nevertheless, political speakers possess a unique combination of ideologies, that is to say a MP can belong to a certain party and share some of the ideologies of that party (liberals for instance), but can develop his/her own views about different issues (e.g., abortion, immigration, minority rights). An MP could be a fervent feminist, but oppose abortion policies. For this reason, the very notion of ideology has a blurred definition, especially when regarding contemporary politics. Van Dijk asserts that ideologies are defined for groups, and not for individuals. They are indeed based on their personal experience, and the distinct groups to which they belong. Consequently, every so often, individuals may have “incompatible” ideologies with the other members of the same group.

Political and ideological discourse analysis is based on individual discourses, so they can be influenced by various ideologies. Therefore, as discourses possess intertextuality, they show what Van Dijk (2002: 23) refers

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as an “interideologicality”6_{as well. One of the most interesting challenges,}

according to Van Dijk, is to identify the unique interactions of specific discourses, in addition to the identification of the ideological sources.

The author draws on two other theoretical issues; professional group ideologies control our daily institutional activities (e.g., professors, journalists, judges, etc.). The same can be noticed in politicians, whose social identities are defined by categories such as activities, aims and goals, norms and values, relations to other groups. These categories will be recognisable in their discourse. Van Dijk (2002) provides a profile of the identity of politicians performing their professional role:

a) Identity: Election to political office.

b) Activities: “Doing” politics (representing citizens, legislating, etc). c) Aim: Governing the country, state or city, etc.

d) Norms, values: Democratic values, honesty, etc.

e) Position, relation to other groups: Relation with constituents, etc. f) Resource: Political power.

In order to elaborate the contents of these categories, it is necessary to gather empirical data, that is the analysis of political discourse in which politicians make reference to their profession, regarding themselves and other politicians. Therefore, as it is often the case in many political discourses, a politician accuses another one of “not listening to the people”. It can be assumed that at the base of the norms that define the ideology of politicians there is the fact that “they have (or to be more realistic, should) listen to the people” (Van Dijk, 2002). The second issue concerns whether political ideologies represent a specific sub-type that differs from the professional ideologies of politicians, which can be applied to all that specific category of politicians belonging to

6_{According to Van Dijk (2002) discourses exhibit an “interideologicality” in the same way they}

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one side or the other (for instance, liberal or conservative parties). If such ideologies exist, they must apply to the vast domain of politics and thus organise political attitudes and practices. However, some of these ideologies (socialism, or liberalism for instance) not only apply to politics, but also to certain social issues outside this field (e.g., the labour market, corporate activities, etc.). This can be observed in “typical” social ideologies such as feminism, anti-racism, or religious ideologies, such as Christianity or Islam.

Further analysing the concept of political ideology, it can be seen that the concept of democracy is a dominant ideology. Every politician defines himself/herself as “democratic”. If analysed from an ideological point of view, democracy is a cultural common denominator in politics, even though nowadays it is hardly recognisable as an ideology. Indeed, the lack of democracy is often perceived as something foreign or distant in time. After reflecting on the theoretical framework discussed above, it is now possible to focus on the ideological analysis of political discourse. To summarise, political discourse and its characteristics are controlled by one or more ideologies, social attitudes, and personal mental models derived from concrete events, and context models of the communicative situation. Van Dijk (2002) examines certain aspects of political discourse. Firstly, the dimensions, levels, structures, strategies in which beliefs (with an ideological base) exhibit themselves in discourse. Secondly, there is evidence of the interplay of ideologies.7

2.6 Conclusion

The observations analysed by Van Dijk (2002) show how political discourse is filled with ideological expressions, often there are more than one playing at the same time and that are relevant in different contexts. These professional ideologies control attitudes, practices and discourses of MPs and dictate what

7_{In this study, I will not focus in detail these aspects, as they will shift the attention from the}

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it is right for them to do. If a politician breaks these norms and values, they will be judged negatively and perhaps politically accused. Another important aspect to consider is the direct (or indirect) expression of the political ideologies that are at the core of the politics and policies of parties (e.g., Conservative or Labour). For example, labour may be less restrictive than Conservative in reducing benefits. Lastly, politics has an influential priority over ideologies. For instance, even though a party has a pro-immigrant philosophy, the voters may influence the politicians in “forgetting” their principles (this is more evident when their governing is at stake). Therefore, if an ideology becomes practical and utilitarian (for instance, a strategy to win the election) it may become dominant. Thus, when applying ideologies to political discourse, as the nature of politics is strongly interchangeable, it looks rather difficult to make assumptions that may be applied to general politics.

Having analysed this topic, Van Dijk (2002) specifies how, from this perspective, political discourse is a highly-specialised discourse, defined and delineated by those professionals who perform their role in certain institutions. Although it may be possible for “normal” individuals to talk about the same aspects and deploying the same ideologies as the politicians, they will not be able to perform a political discourse since they are not professionals.

Thus, how can political news be perceived from this perspective? I personally venture to say that there are only few cases in which the political matter is discussed by media. Firstly, a certain journalist is an ex-politician (or still performing as such), or he/she is specialised in politics, which gives them a professional perspective on political discourse. Secondly, it may be a case in which a journalist or a newspaper is not specialised in politics. In this latter case, news should only be perceived as a “report” of political discourse. However, in both cases, it is crucial to keep in mind that by the definition discussed above, political discourse, in order to be regarded as such, should be performed in a political environment. Therefore, it can be assumed that when a

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political discourse has been performed, what happens next, such as reporting the news, or even a politician telling someone what has been discussed outside that specific event, cannot be described as political discourse. In other words, if political discourse loses the characteristics that belong to this kind of discourse, on the other hand it keeps a discursive nature, but only (if, as this is the case, talking about news media) as news discourse. In the next chapter I will focus further on the processes of news making and on the role of journalists, as well as the process of editing and the role of audience.

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3. CHAPTER 3 – NEWS MEDIA

3.1 Language of the News Media: the role of journalists, editing, and the audience

In order to analyse news in detail, it is crucial to understand how the complex process of news-making works. For this reason, I took into consideration the work of Bell (1991) to focus on this topic. According to the author, the reader often tends to overlook the various levels that lead to a piece of news. The obtained product which a reader finds and reads in a newspaper, or in the website, travelled a long journey from the event from which is taken. These layers start from an event (e.g., a debate, or an interview, and so on), with one or more participants that actively participate in the making of that specific event. Then, the audience (there are many degrees of audience, e.g., a person who is physically attending a debate, or another one who is watching a video of the event) perceives what they hear in a unique way, as each individual perceives it differently due to his/her peculiar perception of the world.

As seen in the previous chapter regarding ideologies, each individual is a unique combination of ideologies and beliefs. For this reason (and others which I will not take in consideration here), the perception of reality or, as in this case, an event is filtered by various layers. Thus, a specific event may be perceived in a completely different way for each participant, let alone the many other layers that lie between the event and the final article of a newspaper.

Therefore, if for instance, a journalist is reporting on a debate, he/she will write a piece of what he/she has perceived, focusing on some parts which are assessed as more relevant. Perhaps, this journalist will give notes to another colleague who will form his/her own idea about the issue, and this work will be checked and edited by another person, and so on. Therefore, it is evident that news is a complex “product” with many layers and various points of views.

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Thus, when analysing news, it is crucial to understand how news-making and news language works. Many studies have been written regarding this topic. However, it would be misleading for the sake of this thesis to discuss only superficially this topic. Therefore, I believe that a brief introduction in the following paragraphs on Bell’s work is necessary.

Bell (1991) underlines how news is a case of language in which multiple parties are involved. Indeed, he asserts that news is seldom a solo performance. Bell (1991: 5) also refers to media audiences as “large and multi-layered, ranging from the interviewer whom a news-maker addresses face to face, to the absentee mass audience”. Bell refers to news-makers as all who are regularly involved in overseeing, writing or editing news. He concentrates intensively on the structured framework of news production, starting from where news is taken and how it is modelled, at the beginning from various parts, to the very production of a news, prepared to be read by audience. In the following sub-sections, I review Bell’s notions related to the role of authors (more specifically journalists), the importance of editing and audience that are crucial to understand news-making processes. Moreover, I briefly introduce the concept of news values, news schemata and macro-rules.

3.2 The role of journalists

Bell (1991) states that defining journalists, whose key role is to produce news language, as sole originating authors is an extreme idealisation. Indeed, Bell, who describes himself as both a linguist and a journalist, declares that a journalist is as much a compiler as a creator of language, and that embedding is just one example of media communication strategies (1991:7). He later provides a list of the input sources used by journalists: interviews, public addresses, press conferences, written texts of spoken addresses, organizationally produced documents (reports, surveys, agendas, etc.), press releases, prior stories on a topic, news agency copy, and the journalist’s notes

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from all the above inputs.

3.3 The importance of editing

Another important aspect of news-making is editing, which is defined by Bell (1991) as a process by which a text is transformed into another text, and consists in deleting sections of a story, adding basic explanatory material and cleaning up spelling mistakes and stylistic problems. More specifically, he divided editing changes into three parts:

1. Information deletions: the most common operation for a news agency to undertake according to Van Dijk (1988);

e.g. his research into a new… his research

2. Lexical substitutions: replacing one or more words with alternative items

e.g. in the last ten years in the last decade

3. Syntactic editing rules: such as technology on editing (e.g., electronic editing is more accurate than pencil on paper) and choosing an alternative lead and order8_{(the way in which a story can be reordered to maximize its}

new value).

3.4 The role of audience and the accommodation theory

8_{According to Bell (1991: 11) “lead and order are the most important aspects of getting the}

most out of a story. General advice on news writing is found in texts such as those issued either by elite outlets such as The Times or by news agencies”.

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It is also necessary to analyse the role of audience who is the last step of the news-making scheme,9_{but also the most important, as Bell (1991) affirms:}

The audience is arguably the most important and certainly the most researched component of mass communication. Media live by the size and composition of their audiences. (p. 11) Speakers and authors, as well as journalists who are of more interest for this study, design or accommodate their talk or text for their hearers/readers. In relation to this idea, Giles and Powesland (1975) define the accommodation theory10_{according to which a speaker accommodates his speech style to the}

hearers. This theory proposes to discover the motivations behind accommodative strategies and suggests that approval-seeking is a prime motive. Bell (1991) later adds, referring to McQuail (1969), that most of the characteristics of mass communication focus mainly on the audience. In another work (1984), Bell also suggests that the strategies used by authors can be responsive or initiative11_{, depending on the style and type of genre they}

produce.

3.5 News values

Before discussing any other topic, it is important to consider the concept of news value which concerns the way in which news is presented. Bednarek

9_{According to Bell (1991) “Media audiences are large and multi-layered, ranging from the}

interviewer whom a newsmaker addresses face to face, to the absentee mass audience, which itself consists of different segments”. (p. 5)

10_{According to Bell (1991) “The theory was largely developed to analyse and account for how}

speakers modify their speech in the complex dynamics of interpersonal encounters where one moment’s speaker becomes hearer the next moment. Accommodation theory also attempts to specify the motivations which lie behind use of particular accommodative strategies. Approval seeking has been recognized as a prime motive in accommodation. This is very powerful in mass communication, where we assume that communicators are always in some sense trying to win the approval of the audience.” (p. 15)

11_{According to Bell (1991), “In responsive style shift, there is a regular association between}

language and social situation. Initiative style shift is essentially a redefinition, by the speaker, of the relationship between speaker and audience. The baseline from which initiative shifts operate is the style normally designed for a particular kind of addressee”. (p. 17)

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(2012) investigated news values stating that, in order to be registered as news, an event has to cross a certain threshold. She provides the first definition of news values as “values by which one ‘fact’ is judged more newsworthy than another” (Bell 1991: 155), and later she offers other definitions given by scholars who investigated this topic. For instance, “the criteria or rules that news workers apply to determine what is news” and “the (imagined)

preferences of the expected audience (p. 40). According to Bednarek (2012)

all these definitions share the determination to discover what it is required to make an event newsworthy.

Bell (1991) divides news values into three specific categories: values in news actors and events, values in the news process, and values in the news text. As follows:

- Values in news actors and events: Negativity, Recency, Proximity,

Consonance, Unambiguity, Unexpectedness, Superlativeness, Relevance, Personalization, Eliteness, Attribution, Facticity.

- Values in the news process: Continuity, Competition, Co-option12,

Composition, Predictability, Prefabrication.

- Values in the news text: Clarity, Brevity, Colour13.

According to Bednarek (2012), news values are associated with events reported in news stories and the news actors involved in them. Table 2 provides an adaptation of Bell’s (1991) models through Bednarek’s (2012) work on news values:

12_{According to Bednarek (2012), co-option consists in “associating one story with a more}

newsworthy one” (p. 40)

13_{According to Bednarek (2006), “Colour suggests that news stories should highlight}

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News values Description

Negativity Called “the basic news value” (Bell 1991: 156), it concerns with the negative aspects of an event.

Timeliness The relevance of the event in terms of time, “the best news is something which has only just happened” (Bell 1991: 156).

Proximity The geographical and/or cultural nearness of the event.

Prominence The high status of the individuals (e.g. celebrities, politicians), organizations or nations involved in the event, including quoted sources. Consonance The extent to which aspects of a

story ﬁt in with stereotypes that people may hold about the events and people portrayed in it.

Impact The effects or consequences of an event.

Novelty The unexpected aspects of an event. Superlativeness The maximized or intensified

aspects of an event.

Personalisation The personal or human-interest aspects of an event.

Table 2 - News values summary.

Bednarek analysed these aspects thoroughly. However, despite their importance regarding news media, they will not be examined as they would induce a completely different approach for the topic from the one chosen for this thesis. The newsworthiness, at least not in the terms discussed above, is not

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an aspect that will be considered later in this study. Indeed, for what concerns the criteria of the corpus, I will select those articles that describe, study, or discuss Brexit (as I will explain later in another chapter). Therefore, even though I will implicitly deploy Bednarek’s news values, I will not provide a definition about what make certain articles newsworthy.

Another important contribution of Bednarek is the distinction between Bell’s categories and hers. Once more and for the same reason as the values that make newsworthy an event, this issue will not be analysed further. Table 3 compares the two models:

Bell’s (1991) Categories Bednarek (2012) Categories

Values in the news text News writing objectives Values in the news process News cycle/market factors Values in news actors and events News values

Table 3 – A comparison between Bell’s and Bednarek’s categories.14

3.6 News schemata

The macrostructure of discourse, a global form by which topics can be ordered in a text has been defined in a schema15_{that consists of categories (with a}

hierarchical order) which “may be specific for different discourse types and conventionalized and hence different in various societies or cultures” (Van Dijk, 1988) 16_{. There are many types of schema in different contexts, for}

instance in everyday conversation where speakers are accustomed to greeting each other, deploying sequences of closing turns and leave-taking formulas.17

14_{In-depth analysis of this topic is found in Bednarek (2012).}

15_{According to Bell (1991) “News schemata are syntax of news stories, the formal categories}

into which news can be analysed and their relations to each other. Different types of text, like news and personal narratives, have different schemata. Different languages or cultures may have different schemata for similar genres.” (p. 22)

16_{Schema (plural, schemata) is a mental framework based on past experience developed as a}

means of accommodating new facts, and hence making sense of them.

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Schegloff and Sacks (1973) provided an explanation of how conversations end starting from the consideration of features of sequential organisation of conversation and organisation of speaker turns. They state that a “single conversation does not simply end, but is brought to a close” (p. 69). The authors affirm that in face-to-face interaction there are physical doings and positionings, along with a show of attention and interest, that are required at the moment of termination. The speakers take measures inside the conversation to prepare the termination. These measures are defined “closing sections” (p. 77). However, a topic may be improvised as an insertion into the closing sequence to extend the time available.

Another example of schemata can be observed in narrative stories for instance. According to Labov and Waletzky (1967), this type of schemata can be structuralized in Summary, Setting, Complication, Resolution and Coda. Thus, it can be assumed that discourse, in all its hues, has a fixed schematic organization as well. Language users learn most schemata during socialisation, although for some of them, especially in professional discourse, a special training it is sometimes required. The same strategies and structures may be applied to scientific discourse according to Van Dijk (1988), and therefore also to news and political discourse.

3.7 Macro-rules

An important contribution to a news story is a macro-proposition.18_Especially

longer discourse is indeed composed by several topics; Macro-rules19_{supply a}

structure from discourse. As some topics are more general or abstract, there is

18_{Van Dijk (1988) states that “for ease of reference, we simply call propositions that are part}

of macrostructures ‘macro-propositions; and we will henceforth assume that each topic of a text can’ be represented as such a macro-proposition”. (p. 37)

19_{According to Van Dijk (1977) macro-rules are “rules to transform one proposition sequence}

into another ‘at another level’ of description. This kind of semantic transformation we will call a macro-rule. The macro-rules must preserve global truth and meaning”. (p. 9)

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a hierarchal organization on various levels for each macro-proposition. The key role of macro-rules is to reduce information. This can be accomplished, as Van Dijk (1988) affirms, in three ways:

a. By deleting the information that is no longer relevant in the text;

b. By replacing a sequence of propositions with one generalisation (e.g. I have a cat, a dog, and a canary becomes I have pets);

c. By replacing a sequence of propositions of the processes of an act or event with a one macro-proposition that stands for the act or event.

3.8 Subjectivity

As language users assign meanings in the process of interpreting texts, it can be seen how macrostructures have a cognitive nature, as van Dijk (1988) reports:

People assign a topic to a text, or infer it from a text, and these processes are a constituent part of understanding. This also enables them to construct their own personal macrostructures. (p. 33) However, as each individual has a different perception of reality due to his/her background and culture (as discussed often in this thesis), there are some slight differences in the importance given by language users to information on the same text. Topics are therefore subjective. For this reason, in order to express a clearly recognisable topic a speaker/writer may signal its importance by stressing it and deploying expressions such as the aim of this study is… or the most important aspect of this topic is… so that the listener/reader may or may not, depending on his/her interests and attention, recognise its significance (Van Dijk: 1988).

Topics, therefore play a crucial role in understanding a text. They can be signalled in several ways, so those that are more important are easily recognised

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by the hearer/reader. Sequences of propositions are responsible for conveying through macro-processes a topic, that is a “strategically derived subjective macro-proposition” (Bell: 1991) within a text. Therefore, topics help to understand what a text is about in its wholeness. Otherwise, it would be only possible to comprehend local fragments of the text without having a precise idea of their relationships, hierarchy, and organisation. To summarise, analysing news discourse, along with its features discussed in this chapter, is an arduous task as each topic is a complex formulation. The aim of this thesis however, is not to provide a deep view of these topics, but, instead, to analyse many aspects of a particular news subject, specifically Brexit. In the chapter dedicated to the analysis of data, I will employ the theoretical framework discussed in the next chapter, i.e., the appraisal framework. However, I believe that these introductory chapters regarding political and news discourse will help the reader to understand the processes and hopefully will generate an interest for future studies.

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4. CHAPTER 4 – APPRAISAL THEORY

4.1 Evaluation in discourse

Evaluation is a linguistic phenomenon in which speakers and/or writers, express their attitudes, opinions and judgements. Linguists, as Crawford Camiciottoli (2013) asserts, are particularly interested in “the interactional, interpersonal and rhetorical dimensions of communication” (p. 22). Crawford Camiciottoli (2013) lists the approach used by various scholars to address this topic, and specifies that despite they all regard attitudinal meanings, they are not completely interchangeable as they possess different focus and patterns of articulation:

1. Connotation (Lyons, 1977)

2. Modality and Modalisation (Halliday, 1985) 3. Evidentiality (Chafe, 1986)

4. Commentary Markers (Fraser,1996)

5. Stance (Biber and Finegan, 1988; Biber et al., 1999; Hyland,1999) 6. Evaluation (Thompson and Huntson, 2000; Huntson, 2011)

7. Appraisal (Martin, 2000; Martin and White, 2005)

Attitudinal meanings can be deployed by writers to influence the reader. Therefore, it is an important aspect to analyse. In this study, I will apply the framework developed by Martin and White (2005), as explained in the next sub-section.

4.2 The appraisal model: overview

White (2001) defined the term appraisal as “the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positionings”. Following Crawford Camiciottoli (2013), I

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selected this model to investigate the rhetorical dimension of communication, more specifically the position assumed by speakers/writers in order to influence hearers/readers. Before investigating this topic in detail, I believe that an introduction to the appraisal model formulated by Martin and White (2005) is compulsory. Table 4 provides an overview of the model:

APPRAISAL MODEL

Attitude Engagement Graduation

Affect Dialogic positioning Force

Judgement • Disclaim • Raise

Appreciation • Proclaim • Lower

• Entertain Focus

• Attribute • Sharpen

• Soften

Table 4 – The Appraisal model.

The appraisal model is grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics20_,

which refers to the three modes of meaning that operate in all utterances, the textual, the ideational, and the interpersonal (Halliday, 1994). In the following paragraphs, I describe in detail the attitude component of the model, which I will focus on and implement in this study.

4.3 Attitude

Utterances regarding people, things, situations, actions, events or states of affairs which either convey a negative or positive assessment, or which can be

20_{According to Martin and White (2005) SFL is a multi-perspectival model designed to provide}

lenses for interpreting language in use. One of the most basic of these complementarities in the notion of kinds of meaning; the idea that language is a resource for mapping ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning onto one another in virtually every act of communication.

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interpreted as inviting the reader to provide a negative or positive assessments, can be defined as attitudinal. Attitudinal meaning can be conveyed more or less directly. The most direct case involves words that indicate the speaker/writer has taken an attitudinal position (White: 2001, e.g.,The new president's speech was elegant and well-woven). Undoubtedly, it is not always a simple task, as often the attitudinal position is delivered by phrases or the interaction of multiple elements. Indeed, attitude can be seen as a feature of complete utterances (although, as said before, individual words may convey attitudinal position as well). An additional characteristic of attitude is that it can be invoked implicitly. For some readers, a piece of news can trigger a negative/positive attitudinal response that was presumably intended by the writer.

Therefore, a contrast is evident between “implicit”, or evoked, and “explicit”, or inscribed, attitude. Nevertheless, the person who writes an article is responsible for such interpretations, as he/she guides the reader towards these interpretations. Table 5 provides a concise explanation of the contrast between inscribed and evoked attitude.

Inscribed Attitude

Evoked Attitude

Words or phrases that openly carry a positive or negative sense.

The audience interpretation (e.g., right or wrong, strange or normal, attractive or distasteful, and so on) of what is happening.

Table 5 – Explicit VS. Implicit Attitude.

As table 4 shows, attitude is divided into three different sub-categories, which will be subsequently described in more detail.

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Sub-category Definition

Affect

Deals with resources for construing feelings and emotional reactions, indicating how a writer/speaker is emotionally disposed to a person, thing, happening or state of affairs.

Judgement

Deals with resources for assessing behaviour according to various normative principles of human behaviour typically referring to rules or conventions.

Appreciation

Deals with resources for construing the value of things, i.e., the valuation of the form, appearance, composition, impact, significance of human artefacts, and natural objects, as well as human individuals (but not human behaviour) by reference to aesthetics and other systems of social value.

Table 6 – three sub-categories of Attitude.

4.3.1 Affect

When talking about affect, we are dealing with emotions (either positive or negative responses). According to Martin and White (2005), these emotions are indicated through:

1. Verbs that express mental processes: e.g., to love/hate, to interest/bore, to enrage/placate

2. Adverbs, usually circumstances of manner: e.g., happily/sadly

3. Adjectives of emotion: e.g., happy/sad, worried/confident, keen/uninterested

4. The transformation of verbs/adjectives into nouns, i.e., nominalisation: e.g., joy/despair, confidence/insecurity

Therefore, the rhetorical function of affect is to indicate the emotional response that a writer/speaker has towards a person, thing, or situation. Due to