Communicating Conflict

Elizabeth Thomson is Senior Lecturer in the School of English Literatures, Philosophy and Languages, at the University of Wollongong, Australia. P. R. R. White is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Adelaide, Australia.

"This book is a good resource for researchers dealing with newspaper journalism, and the existing differences and similarities between reporting in different cultures and languages. That is closely connected to one of the main objectives of this collection of essays, which mainly focus on the analysis of reporter-voice - and hard news textual organization - as a means of advancing a particular value position while at the same time backgrounding the writer's attitudinal role. It is for this reason that one of the key positive aspects of this book is that it can be considered an introductory research to the area of comparative analysis of news reporting across cultures... In terms of thematic and content organization...all the articles in the book follow the same theoretical framework - appraisal framework in combination with Systemic Functional Grammar. This allows the reader to follow all the analyses without having to consider - and shift between - different theoretical approaches to the analysis of discourse, and at the same time it increases the book cohesion. Additionally, the book also follows one thematic line, as all the chapters included in it deal with some kind of 'conflict'; something which increases its value as a resource for the study of evaluation in news items... As we can infer from reading this book, one of the main advantages of the appraisal framework is that it provides a tool for the analysis of evaluation in a situation in which finding the linguistic tools through which it can be transmitted is essential..." -Laura Filardo Llamas, The Linguist List, December 12, 2008

• 1. The news story as rhetoric: P R R White (University of Adelaide, Australia) and Elizabeth Thomson (University of Wollongong, Australia); I: Conflict between Nation States; 2. Variation in 'reporter voice': Annabelle Lukin (Macquarie University, Australia); 3. Evaluating 'reporter voice': Elizabeth Thomson (University of Wollongong, Australia) and Nagisa Fukui (University of New South Wales, Australia); 4. America's War on Terror: a Vietnamese perspective: Tran Thi Hong Van; 5. Symbolising ideology: Motoki Sano; 6. Ideologically opposed news stories: Alice Caffarel (University of Sydney, Australia); 7. Debating Taiwanese authorities in the Chinese media: Edward McDonald; 8. Australian and Indonesian reporting of military clashes in Indonesia: Ari Poespodihardjo and Philip Kitley; II: Conflict within Nation States; 9. Construing death in the Thai media: John Knox (Macquarie University, Australia) and Pattama Patpong (Macquarie University, Australia); 10. 'Reporter voice' in the reporting of conflict in Finland: Maj-Britt Hoglund; 11. Evaluation in news images: comparative studies of the detention of refugees: Dorothy Economou; Index.