NEWS & EVENTS
Appliable Linguistics Seminar 27
(Seminar on Language Science and System Science 93
Time: 16:30, 21 September 2016
Venue: #304, School of Foreign Languages
Speaker: Dr. Huan Changpeng
Title: The Strategic Ritual of Emotionality in Chinese and Australian Hard News: A Corpus-based Study
Abstract: This paper investigates the ways in which Chinese and Australian journalists strategically mobilise and mediate emotions in hard news reporting on risk events that disturb social order. Drawing on a newly built comparable corpus of Chinese and Australian hard news reporting on risk events, the study found that both Chinese and Australian journalists endeavour to reconstruct social order in the face of risk events mainly through building a shared feeling community. However, Chinese and Australian journalists strategically communicate emotions to construct different centers of social values. In Australian hard news, the center of social values holding the nation together is construed through ordinary citizens, whereas in the Chinese context the center is construed through power elites. The paper argues that such cultural variability concerning the ritual of emotionality is relevant to the changing press conditions (e.g. tightening media budget, increasing press competition, and rising broadloidisation), and particularly relevant to divergent stances undertaken by Chinese and Australian journalists.
