Re-thinking engagement: Dialogic strategies of alignment in letters to two South African newspapers
- Authors: Smith, Jade , Adendorff, Ralph
- Date: 2014
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/125876 , vital:35828 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10228195.2014.909872
- Description: This article uses an appraisal analysis of 40 letters to the Daily Sun and The Times newspapers in South Africa to illustrate a reconceptualisation of the Engagement system. It discusses dialogism (Bakhtin 1981), which inspired the creation of the Engagement framework by White (2003), who classified attempts to either align or disalign readers with a writer’s stance. Contrary to the options for dialogic Engagement proposed by Martin and White (2005) and White and Don (2012), the data suggests that not all Engagement strategies carry equal power of alignment, as the framework’s systemic layout implies. This prompts a re-thinking of the Engagement categories as occurring along a continuum of their strength.
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- Date Issued: 2014
Newspapers as ‘community members’: Editorial responses to the death of Eugene Terre'Blanche
- Authors: Smith, Jade , Adendorff, Ralph
- Date: 2013
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/125320 , vital:35771 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10228195.2012.702778
- Description: This article uses the appraisal system to expose covert meanings surrounding white supremacist Eugène Terre’Blanche’s murder in editorials from three South African newspapers: The Citizen, Sowetan and The Times. Following Martin and White’s (2005) framework, inscribed and evoked Attitudinal meanings are identified to prove an ‘us versus them’ perspective of Terre’Blanche’s death. Graduation and Engagement strategies supplement this, illustrating how meanings are modified or organized to align readers. The analysis reveals surface attempts to present a ‘balanced view’ of this racially-sensitive event; however, beneath this is clear blame allocation. Additionally, the covert evaluation is explained by Coffin and O’Halloran’s (2006) theory of ‘dog-whistling’, where only aligned readers can detect underlying meanings. This creates the imagined community – ‘us’ – of which the newspaper is seen as a trusted member. Print media, it could be inferred, is symbolic of other South African community members, who mask their evaluations with a politically correct façade.
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- Date Issued: 2013
An APPRAISAL analysis of the discourse of student assistants' reports at an Eastern Cape girls' boarding school
- Authors: Mpofu, Lindiwe , Adendorff, Ralph
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/123052 , vital:35401 , https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2011.651943
- Description: This article reports on a pilot investigation into the language of assessment in a bi-weekly report system of an urban South African all-girls boarding school. The data are drawn principally from four student assistants working in one of the school’s hostels and are analysed using the theoretical framework of APPRAISAL. The focus is on the APPRAISAL resources that the stooges use in writing their reports, specifically their choices from the ATTITUDE and GRADUATION subsystems. Analysis indicates that Judgement and Affect instantiations, augmented by the use of Force rather than Focus, are dominant. There is also individual variation within the overarching prosody, indicating a difference between the ‘newer’ and the ‘older’ student assistants’ reports. We argue that such choices reflect and reaffirm the school’s core values and vision, the reports functioning as monitors of behaviour and as a means of aligning the learners with the school’s standards. The matron’s feedback is suggested to be an added measure of ensuring alignment with the school’s values.
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- Date Issued: 2012
Comprehension and production of figurative language by Afrikaans-speaking children with and without specific language impairment
- Authors: Van der Merwe, Kristin , Adendorff, Ralph
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/123442 , vital:35438 , https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2012.693708
- Description: This article reports on the comprehension and production of figurative language, namely idioms and similes, in first language Afrikaans-speaking (AFR) boys, ages eight to 10 years, and first language Afrikaans-speaking boys with specific language impairment (SLI), also ages eight to 10. It draws on a larger study by Van der Merwe (2007; see also Van der Merwe & Southwood, 2008). Testing of the comprehension and production abilities of the children was conducted verbally and individually and elicited their understanding of 25 idioms and 25 similes. The idioms were first presented without context; if the child gave an incorrect interpretation, the idiom was placed in context. Raw scores show that the SLI group performed marginally more poorly than the AFR group, but there was no statistically significant difference between the comprehension of idioms by the two groups. The same can be said for the number of literal interpretations provided by the groups. Placing the idioms in context was beneficial to both groups. The simile completion task required the children to provide the last word of each simile. For both groups, the similes task proved to be easier than the idioms task but there was again no statistically significant difference found between the two groups. The results seem to imply that children at this developmental phase, aged eight to 10, whether language impaired or not, have not yet fully grasped figurative language as a concept and need explicit instructions on figurative language. The article ends with a reflection on the suitability of idioms and similes as particular categories of figurative language in studies of this nature.
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- Date Issued: 2012
Educated mother-tongue South African English: A corpus approach
- Authors: Adendorff, Ralph , de Klerk, Vivian A , de Vos, Mark , Hunt, Sally , Simango, Ronald , Todd, Louise , Niesler, Thomas
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/124352 , vital:35597 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10228190608566261
- Description: South Africa is anecdotally known for its complex system of speech varieties correlating with variables such as ethnicity, first language, class and education. These intuitions (e.g. Lass 1990) require further investigation, especially in the context of a changing South Africa where language variety plays a key role in identifying social, economic and ethnic group membership. Thus, in this research, the extent to which these variables play a role in variety is explored using a corpus approach (the nature of class and race in the corpus is discussed more fully later in the article). The corpus project, focusing primarily on accent, has been undertaken by members of the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Rhodes University in South Africa, collaborating with staff from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. A corpus (the first of its kind) is being compiled, comprising the speech of educated, white, mother-tongue speakers of South African English (as distinct from Afrikaans English, Indian English, and the second language (L2) varieties of English used by speakers of indigenous African languages), and data collection is well under way. This short article aims to describe the aims of the project, and the methodological approach which underpins it, as well as to highlight some of the more problematic aspects of the research.
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- Date Issued: 2008