“The women’s marches were a phenomenal success and an important cultural moment” - Analysing the use of evaluative language in opinion pieces about the Women’s March 2017 from The New York Times

Abstract

The Women’s March of 2017 was a protest march organised the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, protesting for the rights of women and minorities. The main event in Washington, D.C. is at the centre of this study. This thesis analyses the use of evaluative language in six opinion pieces that were published in The New York Times around the time of the event, focusing on the topic of the Women’s March 2017. The study seeks to discover what kind of evaluative language the opinion pieces use, to examine how and how much the discourse of this channel of media aims to affect the public explicitly and implicitly. The research questions are as follows: In what ways and in what amounts are attitudinal utterances demonstrated in the studied opinion pieces? How many of the attitudinal instances are expressed explicitly and how many implicitly? To determine the answers to these questions, Martin and White’s appraisal theory is used for analysing the data, with the focus mostly on quantitative analysis. Only the attitude domain of appraisal theory (with its subcategories) is used for the analysis, as it is seen as the most relevant one for the purposes of this study. The study does not focus on the targets of the appraisals, but only on the appraisals themselves and the quantity of them. The identified attitudinal instances are further analysed as affect, judgement and appreciation, and the explicitness or implicitness of the instances are also analysed. In addition, all of the identified instances are counted and the frequencies are calculated. Lastly, the results are discussed. It was revealed that the occurrence of attitudinal instances was very frequent in all of the studied opinion pieces, although there was some variation in the amounts between the individual opinion pieces. Thus it can be said that in the source material NYT conveys its desired attitudes considerably through evaluative language. When the explicitness and implicitness of the attitudinal instances was examined, it was discovered that the majority of the instances was explicit in all of the opinion pieces. However, nearly a third of the expressions were revealed to be implicit. Although it was hypothesised that the amount of implicitness would be noticeable, this result was still surprising due to the amount being proportionally as large as a third of the instances.