An Appraisal Study of Social Attitudes in News Reports towards President Obama’s Visit to Vietnam

Abstract

Abstract: This study aims at adopting Appraisal Theory to investigate the social attitudes towards President Obama’s visit to Vietnam in 2016 using news reports interviewing different politicians as the data. The findings indicate several significances. First, the appraisers of the news tend to express their own emotions (by Affect) and evaluate Obama’s visit- related entities or events (by Appreciation) much more than judge the involved people and their behavior (by Judgment). Besides, the appraisers of the news tend to choose a safe stance either by separating themselves from the arguments expressing opinions with more Expansions than Contractions or by attributing the judgmental elements to the external sources. It can be argued that Appraisal Theory can be applied as a useful tool for Vietnamese language discourse analysis to help uncover various aspects of sentiment such as the appraisers and objects of appraisal, bias of the appraisers and of the author, the attitudes and manners of engaging in the sentiment expression.