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Exploring the news discourse on the energy sector in the Russian and the US newspapers
In this comparative study, we investigate the linguistic devices that may be used to construct news values in the news items related to the energy sector in the Russian and the US broadsheet newspapers Kommersant and The New York Times. Based on the observations of Thompson and Hunston (2000: 6–7) that one of the three functions of evaluation is to reflect a value system, we turn to the framework for a linguistic analysis of news discourse presented in Bednarek (2006) and Bednarek and Caple (2012a,b, 2017). This framework is situated within the discursive approach and is to be regarded as complementary to cognitive approaches that take news values as socially-shared cognitive representations (Van Dijk, 1988). The above methodology provides the means to find out what values are emphasized (foregrounded), rare, or absent (backgrounded). The objective of the paper is twofold. Firstly, we investigate whether a given topic on the energy sector is repeatedly associated with particular news values, such as Negative, Novel, Elite, etc., and, if so, what the effect of this may be. Secondly, we analyze attitudinal expressions that are employed to make events more newsworthy. After that, we compare the results from both newspapers since there is no claim that the same resources would work across languages. In order to fulfill the first objective, we use the following techniques for the news values analysis: analysis of the frequency of word forms and clusters, analysis of keywords, semantic tags, dispersion analysis, and concordance. For our second objective, the analysis of attitudinal expressions, we deploy a combination of the two frameworks: The Appraisal framework (Martin & White 2005) and the parameter-based framework of evaluation (Bednarek 2006). The corpus which we annotated includes news items containing 20,000 words for each language for the period of the last three years. Our preliminary corpus analysis shows that the news values that can be construed by linguistic devices associated with attitude, Negativity, Superlativeness, and Timeliness appear to be foregrounded in both languages, while the events are constructed as negative, having significant effects and timely in relation to the publication date. In accordance with that, the linguistic devices that are mostly used are the ones that have reference to the events that have real, important, and relevant consequences, devices that refer to negative evaluative language, and the ones that indicate change or current trends.