Estadão and the President: editorial as a locus of appraisal

ABSTRACT

This article is based on Martin and White’s Appraisal System (2005), which elaborates a taxonomy that aims to analyse collective and individual values shared in a social group. The focus of this study is one of the categories of attitude: judgment, which deals with the behavior of people according to values of social esteem (capacity, tenacity and normality) and social sanction (property and veracity). We investigated, from a quali-quantitative analysis of textual and semantic-discursive nature, how language resources are used in editorials of a Brazilian newspaper regarding the performance of the former President Dilma Rousseff. The results show a predominance of negative judgments about her performance, mostly evaluations of social esteem, especially capacity. These evaluations are mainly explicit and indicate the interpretation that the former President was not prepared to administer Brazil.

Key-words: Appraisal; Judgement; Dilma Rousseff; Editorial