An Appraisal of Burki’s Attitudinal Positioning in Shaping his Authorial Voice

Abstract

The current study aimed to investigate that how an eminent Pakistani writer Hamidullah Khan Burki constructed his attitudinal positioning that shaped his authorial voice in journalistic discourse. The study focused on two aspects: to explore the patterns in Burki’s use of attitudinal resources through lexical choices; and to investigate that how the appraised categories shape Burki’s authorial voice through attitudinal positioning. The current research is a case study, exploratory in nature, which used QUAL-Quan model of mixed method research. After collection of data in the form of 20 journalistic articles of Burki through purposive sampling about politics in Pakistan, the three-dimensional appraisal framework was used to analyze the data qualitatively in the light of Martin & White (2005) Appraisal Theory, which consisted of Attitude Types, Polarity and Appraised Categories. The data was annotated accordingly through UAM Corpus Tool Version 6.2 to generate automatic results for computing the frequency and percentage of various categories in a quick, accurate and systematic manner. The statistical results and subsequent discussion have provided valuable findings in a systematic and objective manner regarding important features and patterns in Burki’s attitudinal positioning that shape his authorial voice. The most dominating feature is the use of appraisal resources of Judgement for shaping his authorial voice. Moreover, he has overall used negative evaluative resources more frequently as compared to positive evaluative resources in his articles. Hence, the findings of the current study depict that Appraisal Theory has provided a comprehensive, systematic and objective framework for appraisal of journalistic discourse.