Book review : 'Stance and voice in written academic genres'

A book review of 'Stance and voice in written academic genres', Ken Hyland and Carmen S Guinda (eds), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 97802303028393 page(s

Negotiating risk in Chinese and Australian print media hard news reporting on food safety : a corpus-based study

Risk is defined by Beck as a ‘systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself’ (Beck, 1992, p. 21). Douglas (1992) and Luhmann (1993) maintain that it is essential to distinguish risk from danger, and to sustain a relationship between risk and responsibility. In this sense, risk almost always invokes external attribution (Luhmann, 1993; Sarangi, Bennert, Howell, & Clarke, 2003; Sarangi & Clarke, 2002), and is best understood as manufactured and constructed (Adam, Beck, & Van Loon, 2000) among a nexus of practices (Scollon & Scollon, 2004). Beck (1992, 1999) argues that meanings of risk are primarily constructed and shaped between government and science. This argument however has largely underplayed the importance of media as a crucial site of engagement where meanings of risk are negotiated among different stake-holders and where such negotiation is mediated by journalistic professional practices (see also Mythen, 2004).22 page(s

Book review : 'News discourse'

3 page(s

Journalistic stance in Chinese and Australian hard news

Theoretical thesis.Bibliography: pages 229-241.Chapter 1. Introduction -- Chapter 2. Towards a linguistic modelling of journalistic stance -- Chapter 3. A multiperspectival approach to journalistic stance : from ontology to methodology -- Chapter 4. Methodology : corpus construction -- Chapter 5. Corpus findings : attitude and engagement -- Chapter 6. The articulation of news values -- Chapter 7. The (re)production of symbolic power -- Chapter 8. Conclusions.This research probes into the concept of journalistic stance by defining it as a nexus of social practice rather than simply linguistic realizations. Journalistic stance has been investigated by drawing on an ontological approach – a multiperspectival approach – to language in social life. This multiperspectival approach holds that analysing discourse/language in social life (e.g. journalistic stance taking practices) needs to incorporate semiotic analysis of discursive performances on site (e.g. the discursive aspect of journalistic stance); ethnographically grounded examination of social, institutional and professional practices and interaction order (e.g. the social-institutional aspect of journalistic stance); accumulated accounts of discursive practices by ratified members of the communities of practice under investigation (e.g. the cognitive or personal aspect of journalistic stance); and explicit reveal of analysts’ motivational relevancies and practice relevance in relation to participants’ perspectives. News writing constitutes the central daily social practice of journalism practitioners. Hence, this research takes the discursive aspect of journalistic stance in news texts as the analytical point of entry into understanding the ways journalistic stances are enacted in Chinese and Australian print media hard news reporting. The discursive aspect of journalistic stance is problematized with the assistance of newly built Chinese and Australian corpora of hard news reporting in relation to discourses of Risk. The APPRAISAL framework has been adopted in the identification of stance markers in news texts. The social-institutional and (inter)personal aspects of journalistic stance have been examined with insights gained from participant observation in news institutions to understand news production processes. Emphasis has been placed on the articulation of news values and the exercise of symbolic power in each context of news production. This research has found an intimate relationship between the discursive articulation of stance patterns in news texts, the production and reproduction of prioritized news values and power relations in Chinese and Australian news discourses. Mediating positive affect and judgement of social esteem of Chinese authorities in communicating risks is more preferable in the Chinese press. In contrast, the Australian press prefer to mediate negative affect of those individuals influenced by risk events in question but Australian journalists are less likely to provoke judgement of news actors than their Chinese peers. Chinese and Australian journalists undertake different stances in mediating different voices in risk communication. Chinese journalists tend to close down the dialogic space for alternative voices when mediating official sources, whereas they tend to open up the dialogic space when mediating news maker voices. In the Australian press, the dialogic space of the official voice is opened up as much as it is closed down. However, the analysis of attesting sources (e.g. eyewitness sources) has shown that Australian journalists are hardly on site in reporting risk events, but that Chinese journalists are often on site and eyewitness the happening of risk events. Australian journalists rely heavily on official and organizational sources, whereas Chinese journalists rely on their own authorial voice. The analysis of news values has demonstrated that the news value of positivity is rather marginal in the Australian press, but that it constitutes a significant news value in the Chinese press. The other news value that has been prioritized in the Chinese press is that of personalization (e.g. the human interest aspect of an event or issue). These two news values – positivity and personalization – have been prioritized consistently in the Chinese press, because they are always highlighted in policy documents in news institutions, in daily editorial meetings, in Chinese journalists’ perception of news values and projected on stance patterns in news texts. The power relations and hegemony were (re)produced in each context of news discourse in different ways. Although Chinese press have been undergoing reform towards marketization, the Communist Party of China still keeps the Chinese press firmly on leash by manipulating the distribution of economic and symbolic capital. With four significant newspaper owners overall (News Corp, Fairfax, Seven West Media Limited, and APN News & Media), Australia has one of the most highly concentrated newspaper ownership in the developed world beyond the Party-controlled papers of the communist realm. Despite such a high concentration of press ownership, Australia is known for its belief in and pursuit of media diversity. One basic means to ensure media diversity is to make available to all Australians access to a diversity of media voices in the course of sustaining an effective engagement of people in the democratic discourses. However, while the Chinese press perpetuate the ideology of the government, the Australian press are dominated by the commercial ideology of media proprietors. In other words, to accumulate economic profits in the Chinese press constitutes a significant means to achieve the end of political control of ideology in news production. In contrast, to switch between different political ideologies constitutes a significant means for the Australian press to achieve the end of maximizing economic profits for media proprietors. The research findings are of relevance to a wide range of researchers such as discourse analysts in the field of news discourse and other scholars whose research is relevant to stance/evaluation, or those engaged in corpus-informed studies, along with those in the field journalism and communication.Mode of access: World wide web1 online resource (xi, 244 pages) graphs, table

APPRAISAL framework : its history, status quo and future development

Semantic rather than lexico-grammatical resources as it is attributed to, APPRAISAL serves to negotiate, engage and graduate resources pertaining to affect, judgement and appreciation. This paper focuses on the theoretical and empirical background of APPRAISAL, along with discussion of the impact of such background upon the system per se; it then contrastively analyses different models of APPRAISAL in its course of revision and development; lastly it presents issues regarding drawbacks of APPRAISAL, together with its recently emerging research topics.28 page(s

Establishment and characterization of a new intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma cell line derived from a Chinese patient

Abstract Patients with intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) require chemotherapy due to late detection, rapid disease progression, and low surgical resection rate. Tumor cell lines are extremely important in cancer research for drug discovery and development. Here, we established and characterized a new intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma cell line, ICC-X1. STR testing confirmed the absence of cross-contamination and high similarity to the original tissue. ICC-X1 exhibited typical epithelial morphology and formed tumor spheres in the suspension culture. The population doubling time was approximately 48 h. The cell line had a complex hypotriploid karyotype. The cell line exhibited a strong migration ability in vitro and cell inoculation into BALB/c nude mice led to the formation of xenografts. Additionally, ICC-X1 cells were sensitive to gemcitabine and paclitaxel but resistant to 5-fluorouracil and oxaliplatin. RNA sequencing revealed that the upregulated cancer-related genes were mainly enriched in several signaling pathways, including the TNF signaling pathway, NOD-like receptor signaling pathway, and NF-κB signaling pathway. The downregulated cancer-related genes were mainly enriched in the Rap1 signaling pathway and Hippo signaling pathway among other pathways. In conclusion, we have created a new ICC cell line derived from Chinese patients. This cell line can be used as a preclinical model to study ICC, specifically tumor metastasis and drug resistance mechanisms