Analysis of Attitudinal Resources in China-Related News in The Star Online

Authors

  • Hong Wu Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
  • Kesumawati A. Bakar Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia
  • Azhar Bin Jaludin Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
  • Norsimah Mat Awal Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17576/3L-2025-3101-02

Abstract

The portrayal of nations in media discourse not only reflects current events but also potentially shapes public perceptions and relationships between countries. This study examines the representation of China, Malaysia's largest trading partner, in Malaysian news, an area previously under-explored. Utilising the Appraisal Framework, we examine attitudinal resources that describe China, thereby assessing how the nation is linguistically and semantically positioned in The Star Online, a leading Malaysian news source. To reveal the underlying attitudes towards China, this study adapts the existing scheme of the UAM CorpusTool for detailed annotation, examining one representative news article from each year over a decade (2012-2021) in The Star Online. Our findings reveal: 1) positive attitudes prevail in the selected news articles; 2) linguistic resources of Judgment are predominant among the three attitudinal types, which means evaluation of behaviours is observed more often in the selected news; 3) the positive attitudes towards China reflect Malaysians' positive perception of China's economic strength, reliability, and optimistic outlook on favourable outcomes in the future. The results reflect a generally positive attitude towards China in The Star Online, which not only verify the workability of the theory, method, and instrument used in discourse analysis but also enrich the study of Malaysian news discourse. Keywords: Appraisal Theory; Attitude; Polarity; China-Related News; The Star Online

Author Biographies

Hong Wu, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

Hong Wu is an English teacher from Guangxi University, Nanning, China. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in linguistics at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and translation studies.

Kesumawati A. Bakar, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia

Kesumawati A. Bakar (Ph.D.)  is a senior lecturer at the Center for Research in Language Studies and Linguistics, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Her research interests include multimodal discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, gender and identity studies.

Azhar Bin Jaludin, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia

Azhar Jaludin (Ph.D.) is a Senior Lecturer at the Center for Language and Linguistic Research, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. His research, publication and teaching interests include general linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and natural language processing.

Norsimah Mat Awal, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia

Norsimah Mat Awal (Ph.D.) was an associate professor at the Centre for Research in Language Studies and Linguistics, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Univeristi Kebangsaan Malaysia. Her areas of interest include Translation, Pragmatics and Semantics.

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Published

2025-03-26

Issue

Vol. 31 No. 1 (2025): March 2025

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Articles

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