A sociocognitive-linguistic analysis of subjectivity in the Hong Kong English news media

Abstract

 : A recent political controversy involving the disqualification of two legislators sparks debate in relation to the ongoing political and ideological conflict in post-handover Hong Kong. This dissertation comparatively examines the hard news coverage of this incident by the region’s two foremost English news publications, the South China Morning Post and The Standard. van Dijk’s sociocognitive framework is adopted, as well as APPRAISAL theory and cognitive linguistic approaches to examine subjectivity as linguistically manifest in the coverage by the two newspapers. In examining corpora comprising a total of 21 news articles spanning the time period from the initial incident to the eventual disqualification of the two legislators, analyses of ENGAGEMENT, force dynamics and metaphor use are undertaken to explore authorial subjectivity from complementary perspectives accounting for both event construal and dialogistic evaluation of the incident. The findings from all three data analysis methods identify emergent linguistic patterns indicating the presence of authorial subjectivity in both monoglossic and heteroglossic voices. This subjectivity was frequently observed in contrastive framing of the two legislators by the newspapers; while the South China Morning Post tending to portray the pair as active and disruptive, The Standard frequently cast the two in a more passive light. While no definitive conclusions can be drawn regarding the ideological alignment of the two publications, the differences in coverage of the incident indicate a strong authorial presence and high degree of subjectivity in their reporting of hard news.