Appraisal Analysis: Thailand in the View of Phnom Penh Post on the Preah Vihear Issue

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to illustrate ways in which Discourse Analysis (DA) looks at the Preah Vihear issue written in the news articles of the main English newspaper of Cambodia, The Phnom Penh Post, from July to October 2008. This period is selected for the study because the situational conflict between Cambodia and Thailand concerning the Preah Vihear Temple affected most citizens and the images of both countries. Further, the conflict also greatly concerned other ASEAN countries, as well as those worldwide. The researcher beleives that the news presentation on this issue written by the Phnom Penh Post is one of the key factors which influenced the readers’ perception and reaction in both countries. Attitude domain—one of the semantic domains of the Appraisal framework (Martin & White, 2005) is selected to uncover the underlying meaning in the texts of the newspaper to indicate how discourses were constructed and the selected discourse semantic categories work under the themes that are set. The results of the study reveal through the linguistic features which are analyzed and classified into the three discourse patterns under the three themes set that Thailand is evaluated negatively compared with Cambodia which is evaluated positively.

Keywords: Discourse Analysis, Newspapers, Preah Vihear, Appraisal, Attitude Domain