Evaluating Attitudes in Crisis: A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis of Covid-19 News Coverage | ||
| مجلة کلية الأداب - جامعة حلوان | ||
| Volume 61, Issue 2, July 2025, Pages 291-342 PDF (1.06 M) | ||
| Document Type: المقالة الأصلية | ||
| DOI: 10.21608/kgef.2025.403694.1269 | ||
| Authors | ||
| Doaa Talaat1; Amany El-Shazly2; Fatma Ismail* 3 | ||
| 1Zagazig University | ||
| 2قسم اللغة الانجليزية - كلية الآداب - جامعة حلوان | ||
| 3,Helwan University | ||
| Abstract | ||
| The present study examines how Western news sites used evaluative language in their coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic and its related issues. By utilizing the language of evaluation, news writers have managed to shape the public’s emotions and ideologies. The study adopted an eclectic methodological approach, combining corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with Attitude, a sub-system of the Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005). The dataset comprises 4,662,477 words, which were collected from different Western news sites between January 2020 and December 2022. The data were divided into two corpora: mainstream news corpus (M. Corpus) and fake news corpus (F. Corpus), in order to compare how mainstream news outlets and fake news outlets used evaluative language to frame the pandemic. The mainstream news corpus, comprising 3,267,271, was compiled from the following mainstream news sites: The Independent, The New York Times, and USA Today. The fake news corpus, comprising 1,395,206, was compiled from Expose News, Clash Daily, and Before its News. The analysis revealed significant differences in the use of evaluative language between the two corpora, suggesting that the language of the pandemic news coverage was systematically shaped by the ideological positioning of mainstream and fake news media. | ||
| Keywords | ||
| Covid-19; Appraisal Theory; Critical Discourse Analysis; corpus linguistics; ideology | ||
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