Abstract
In recent years, corpus-based discourse researchers have become increasingly interested in incorporating non-linguistic data, such as through corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (“CAMDA”) (Bednarek and Caple, 2014: 151). CAMDA is a hybrid method that combines the techniques of corpus linguistics with semiotic discourse analysis. The method uses corpus data which are inherently multimodal, such as news articles with photographs. If corpus-based multimodal discourse analysis limits itself to linguistic analysis, meaning in these texts may not be comprehensively captured (Caple, 2018). CAMDA is also used in Multimodal News Analysis across Cultures to analyze news texts, examining both news language and images with a focus on news values. The new framework, Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA), which was initially applied only to English texts, has now been extended to the examination of Chinese language data. Using two case studies from China and Australia, the book compares news values in national day reports from these two different countries, providing an incentive for researchers and scholars worldwide to apply DNVA to their own local contexts.
The book consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 includes a brief introduction to the concept of news values. Chapters 2 and 3 refer to two case studies, one on the construction of news values regarding the Chinese National Day and the other in relation to the Australian National Day. Finally, chapter four provides a synthesis and comparison of the findings.
Chapter 1 summarizes the concepts of news values and newsworthiness and describes the data and the cross-linguistic CAMDA methodology. The authors conceptualize “news values/newsworthiness” from several perspectives. News values or newsworthiness are grounded on the beliefs of news staff and audience masses (cognitive perspective) and are mediated by discourse (discursive perspective) (p. 5). With a synthesis of these earlier perspectives, the authors adopt a discursive view that includes a more comprehensive analysis of newsworthiness construction through verbal and visual semiotic resources, such as eliteness, negativity, positivity, impact, and proximity (p. 6). To clarify this point, they offer an analytical framework of DNVA through several examples. Following an introduction to the structure of two datasets, the ChinaDay corpus, and the AusDay corpus, the authors explain the approach they use, that is, cross-linguistic CAMDA, which combines the techniques of corpus linguistics with a discourse analysis of different semiotic modes (both verbal and visual text) and compares Chinese and Australian datasets. Finally, they describe the corpus linguistic techniques and software for DNVA.
In chapter 2, the first case study, the authors discuss how CAMDA can be applied to Chinese news discourse. The authors apply DNVA to multimodal news coverage of Chinese holiday celebrations in People's Daily and Nanfang Metro. The findings indicate that both newspapers concentrate on Chinese political elites, mostly portrayed in a fairly positive light to promote patriotism and national image. The authors also observe several exciting trends in the construction of news values in these two newspaper organizations. For example, Nanfang Metro, a local newspaper that is part of a commercial branch of a provincial media organization, uses photographs that focus more on issues such as overcrowding or heavy traffic during the holiday and generally reports more critically than before on the government and Chinese society (Shi, 2014: 120). On the other hand, People's Daily, a representative of the CCP's official newspaper, shows mainly pictures of well-behaved individuals and family groups.
Organized along the same lines, Chapter 3 focuses on the CAMDA of “Australia Day” and reveals more complex news values about how a discursive struggle observed in society is linguistically and visually constructed in The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald. As in the case of Chinese newspapers, the most common news value associated with Australia Day is eliteness (54%). However, eliteness often goes hand in hand with negativity, as the elite news actors are included in reports about the emerging struggle discourse in reference to various issues, such as political conflicts, civil unrest, and accidental deaths that occurred on Australia Day. Compared to the verbal text, positivity (68%) was the most critical value in the images, primarily constructed through positive facial affect, followed by eliteness, proximity, and personalization. Considered together, both verbal and visual coverage give a complex picture of the various facets of Australia Day.
Finally, in chapter four, the authors compare the findings of the two case studies, reflect on methodological limitations, and attempt to outline how the analysis could have been improved. In both data sets, the authors find similar important news values with different characteristics in the verbal and visual construal of newsworthiness. They also find that visual and verbal resources play different roles. In the ChinaDay corpus, the verbal reporting sometimes goes in the opposite direction of the visual reporting, which has fascinating implications, whereas in the AusDay corpus the visual and verbal constructions appear to provide a complementary view of the Australia Day representation. The authors extend their research to the construction of newsworthiness and explain its connection to national identity. Additionally, they point out several limitations of the current approach. For example, the authors analyze only the news values constructed in the direct co-text concerning the national day rather than in the full texts; the study of Chinese media focuses more on a “Western-centric” approach. Finally, they conclude by stating that many factors influence the construction of newsworthiness and that DNVA offers discourse researchers a solid framework to examine the construction of both verbal and visual semiotic sources.
In terms of research methods, this book focuses on a corpus-based quantitative or qualitative approach. It is a relatively short study of discourse itself. Such a method of analysis has obvious advantages at the level of language ontology, that is, vocabulary, sentences, structure, and grammar. However, at the macro and sociocultural levels, it has its limitations. As the authors show, the present study is limited to a few corpus linguistic techniques. To compensate for the inadequacy of corpus-based discourse analysis and expand the field of quantitative discourse research, some scholars (Lee, 2019; Hamdi, 2022) have applied text-mining techniques to discourse analysis. Text mining involves text clustering, text classification, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and statistical methods to extract knowledge from unstructured text. A chapter on discourse analysis based on text mining, integrating DNVA with quantitative text mining to process different discourse genres and lead to different results, would have enriched the case studies.
Despite these limitations, this book is an excellent illustration of how one can combine corpus linguistics with visual DNVA to describe the construction of news values in two different countries around the same event. Indeed, we need a framework to analyze how news values are constructed in different languages. By taking newsworthiness as a starting point and clearly indicating how these news values are constructed in Chinese, the authors address the problem without adopting a merely “Western-centric” framework. A wider range of data and related topics should be studied to create a comprehensive Chinese-specific framework that other researchers could use. However, one feature that makes this book stand out from existing research is the robust DNVA framework, which plays a leading role and enables practical applications. The DNVA framework can be used in English reading and cross-cultural communication classes, greatly enhancing students’ understanding of discourse and their perception of other cultures. It is an indispensable reference for discourse analysis and can be used as a textbook for graduate students and scholars wanting to apply DNVA in their own contexts. It is also useful for all those interested in language teaching involving multimodal discourse. In short, this book not only offers new insights to researchers engaged in inter-semiotic, intertextual, and interlinguistic studies, but also suggests new avenues of inquiry for critical discourse studies on national identity.