The Evaluative Semantics Model: A New Approach in CDA of Journalistic Discourse

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), an approach rooted in critical linguistics movement of 1970s, is a fruitful framework for analyzing journalistic discourse and crystalizing power and ideological relations behind the media. News analysis has been known as one of the most frequent trends within CDA. In this article, a new theoretical framework for news analysis, known as evaluative semantics (White, 2006), has been introduced. This framework is essentially a semantic one and influential in analyzing news from a new perspective. In this research, besides introducing the above-mentioned model, a sample news text taken from the Washington Post about Iran’s nuclear dossier has been analyzed. The main aim of this research is to study major features of this framework and to scrutinize the potential value it adds to CDA analysis of news texts. Therefore, it is recommended that evaluative semantics model (White, 2006) is competent in adding new areas of research into media analysis within CDA general approach, considering features such as affect, judgment and appreciation in news texts , and clarifying some hidden aspects of media products. The findings of this research can be both inspiring for CDA researchers and unveiling some linguistic and semantic aspects of Western media against Iran’s nuclear dossier. Considering the growing prominence of CDA in text analysis, introducing new trends such as one represented in this article can pave the way for further studies.