ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 is in five sections. Together they set the scene for the whole book, which is about the pivotal and yet dynamic role of evaluation (i.e. the expression of attitudes, opinions and feelings) in the construction of three major newspaper genres: hard news stories, editorials and feature articles. Section 1.1 talks about the nature of this book, highlighting its goal and special characteristics, such as its specially developed framework of analysis. Section 1.2 explains why this book focuses on evaluation in a single newspaper (i.e. the South China Morning Post), and not two or more newspapers. It argues that this approach can provide a new perspective on evaluation in newspaper discourse by studying in greater depth, for example, some of its under-appreciated aspects. Section 1.3 introduces several key terms such as variation and news, which are especially relevant to this study of how evaluation varies across genres (and topic domains) within newspaper discourse. Section 1.4 looks at the data and methodology used for this study. In addition to introducing the specialized corpus and the new analytic framework, this section sets forth the rationale and procedures for corpus building and corpus analysis. Section 1.5 gives an overview of the remaining chapters.
