The Linguistic Covert Resources Invoked to Scale Attitudinal Values in Newspaper News Stories

This research article explores the linguistic strategies employed to grade attitudinal meanings in news discourse. I analyse two news reports published by the Daily Monitor and New Vision because the study involves close reading of news texts and prioritises detailed interpretation of the evaluative language over a large sample size. Particularly, I pay attention to the covert linguistic strategies the authors exploited to sharpen or mitigate the attitudinal values, and/or strengthen or estrange the membership of police officers in the category of law enforcers. Drawing on discourse analysis research design, I adopt the appraisal theoretical framework, concentrating on the subsystem of Graduation to examine the nuanced regulation of attitudinal meanings in hard news reports. The key strategies established include metaphors, repetition, euphemisms, compounded achievements and crimes, and meaning infusion. These strategies are employed in the news reports to underscore the character of the Ugandan law enforcement personnel and the policing institution in general. The analysis also reveals that the strategies used in both New Vision and Daily Monitor news reports tend to intensify the degree of the unconventional behaviour of the law enforcers when responding to theft crises, which in turn impacts the reputation of the police. This study contributes to the body of knowledge in the fields of linguistics and journalism by revealing how hard news reporters strategically use language to regulate attitudinal meanings in the journalistically constrained writing style. The study also reinforces the appraisal theory by explicating that even in sensitive contexts, attitudinal values can be regulated linguistically without compromising the news reporter’s safety and institutional survival. This research article is based on my PhD study. Future researchers should study the covert linguistic mechanisms employed in news reports written in African languages such as Luganda to scale attitudinal values. This could contextualise the application of appraisal theory to native Ugandan languages, except Runyankore-Rukiga, which has been studied by Mugumya (2013).