The Representation of Affect in Chinese Visual-Verbal News Commentary: A Corpus-Based Study

摘要

Visual-verbal discourses are often loaded with affect which is one of the three semantic types of attitude in Appraisal Theory. After corpus collection and annotation on the basis of 100 cases of Chinese new commentary, this research conducts a quantitative study of the representation of affect in Chinese visual-verbal news commentary, which reveals that 1) Affect is not common in the corpus and the most frequently occurred affect is the kind of affect from the depicted disadvantaged participant. 2) While authorial and third-party affects are mainly negative affect toward negative behaviors, affects from the depicted disadvantaged participant mainly express their negative emotion toward the poor encounter, and affects from the depicted negative participant mainly show their negative emotion toward positive behaviors. 3) As for the types of semiotic modals, the majority of affects are verbal affects. Besides, there are both visual and verbal affects from the depicted participants, but neither visual authorial nor third-party affect is found. Findings above prove that the visual-verbal representation of affect in Chinese visual-verbal commentary is a complex process of systematic choices-making of different representational factors, and these choices exactly contribute to the construction of such genre.