EVALUATIVE MEANING IN UZBEK ONLINE NEWS REPORTS: ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT AND GRADUATION IN EMERGENCY AND PRICE COVERAGE
Keywords:
Keywords: appraisal, attitude, engagement, graduation, Uzbek online media, news discourse, evidentiality, reporter voice.Abstract
Abstract. This paper applies Martin and White’s Appraisal framework to Uzbek online news reports published between May 2025 and April 2026 on two topics: emergencies and prices and tariffs. The analysis of a pilot set of reports from Kun.uz, Gazeta.uz and Daryo.uz shows that the three appraisal systems are unevenly distributed. Attitude is dominated by appreciation and by judgement that is attributed to institutional sources rather than voiced by the reporter; affect is almost absent from hard news and surfaces only where ordinary participants are quoted directly. Engagement is organised around attribution, and the verbs selected for it are endorsing rather than distancing. Graduation is realised mainly through quantification — figures, time sequences and enumerations of resources — which carries evaluation while leaving the text formally neutral. Two extensions to the coding scheme are proposed for Uzbek: a morphological feature covering evidential and concessive suffixes, and an explicit distinction between authorial and attributed evaluation.
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