Attitude Markers in Sports News:

A Corpus-based Study of Native and Non-Native Discourse

Abstract

Martin and White’s (2005) appraisal theory explores the ways through which evaluative use of language expresses the interpersonal meanings in a text. Despite numerous studies using the appraisal framework, there is little research done on the comparison of appraisal resources used by native and non-native English news writers in discourse produced on the same task. A corpus of 1 million each of native and non-native sports news discourse is compiled from (Britain) native and (Pakistani) non-native online English newspapers, to which the appraisal framework is applied in the current study, comparing the ideological positions and evaluative standpoints of native and non-native sports news writers in sports news discourse. A mixed-method design is applied to carry out the sequential explanatory analysis of the data. The findings indicate the substantial variation in the evaluative use of attitudinal resources when used positively and negatively in native and non-native corpora. In general non-native sports, news writers have used significantly higher frequency of positive and negative attitudinal markers as compared to the native news writers. Non-native news writers have used more affect resources while native news writers have used appreciation resources abundantly as compared to affect and judgment resources. Findings offer further variation in the evaluative stance of native and non-native sports news writers that may be used for studying the difference in academic and non-academic writing styles.