Collen Sabao

Evaluating authorial ‘objectivity’ and ‘stancetaking’ in reporting the making of a new constitution in Zimbabwean newspapers

ABSTRACT Zimbabwe held ‘fresh’ elections on July 31, 2013 under a new constitution. This was in line with the provisions of the Global Political Agreement (GPA), a political power-sharing compromise signed between Zimbabwes three main political parties, following the heavily disputed 2008 harmonised presidential and parliamentary elections. The GPA established in Zimbabwe a Government of National Unity (GNU). On the road to making a new constitution, political differences and party politicking always seemed to take precedence over national interest. This political polarity in Zimbabwe resulted in the heavy polarity of the media, especially along political ideological grounds. The new constitution-making process and all its problems received heavy coverage in almost all national newspapers. This article analyses the discourse-linguistic notion of ‘objectivity’ in ‘hard’ news reports on the new constitution-making process by comparing the textuality of ‘hard’ news reports from two Zimbabwean national daily newspapers: the government-owned and controlled Herald and the privately owned Newsday. Focusing on how language and linguistic resources are used evaluatively in ways that betray authorial attitudes and bias in news reporting, the article examines how the news reports uphold or flout the ‘objectivity’ ideal as explicated through the ‘reporter voice’ configuration, and within Appraisal Theory.

Feature conditioned resolution of hiatus in Chichewa

Abstract This article examines the morphophonological environments in which vowel sequences occur in Chichewa and explains the synchronic hiatus resolution strategies that are employed in this language to remove these dispreferred vowel cluster configurations. This investigation demonstrates that the major motivation for resolving hiatal configurations in Chichewa, like in many other Bantu languages, is to maintain the preferred canonical consonant-vowel (CV) syllable structure. The analysis of data used in this study is mainly couched within the theoretical explications of Optimality Theory (OT) as enunciated by Prince and Smolensky (1991, 1993), McCarthy and Prince (1999), Archaengeli and Langendoen (1997), and Kager (1999); Distinctive Feature Theory as discussed by Chomsky and Halle (1968) as well as the generative CV-phonology model of syllable structure as discussed by Clements and Keyser (1983). This article argues for vowel-feature sensitive repair of hiatal configuration in Chichewa. Observing such a vowel-feature sensitive based repair of hiatal configuration analysis, which this article argues to be largely ONSET motivated/triggered and the featural properties of the phonological structures of the language under study, the languages reactions to such dispreferred vowel clusters and its phonotactics are here examined. Repair strategies for such hiatus configurations are discussed, including glide formation, consonantal and/or glide insertions, vowel deletion and coalescence. The analysis adopted here implies that the resolution hiatus arises from incompatibilities in the features of the vowels straddling a word boundary. It argues that these repair strategies are largely motivated by language internal constraint ranking systems which in many Bantu languages seem to largely prefer the preservation of [−] features over [+] features, i.e. the ranking [−F’]≫[+F’].

Arguments for an appraisal linguistic discourse approach to the analysis of ‘objectivity’ in ‘hard’ news reports

ABSTRACT Studies focusing on the ideal of ‘objectivity’ in ‘hard’ news reports are numerous, with most of them falling within journalistic studies and being theorised from diverse theoretical insights. This article departs from a journalistic to a linguistic discourse approach, presenting evidence that the linguistic discourse analytical framework of Appraisal Theory provides alternative ways of analysing ‘objectivity’ and ideological bias in ‘hard’ news reports. Couched in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), appraisal is a model that explains the way(s) in which language construes attitude, and enables writers and speakers to position themselves evaluatively with respect to the viewpoints of potential respondents and other speakers/writers (Thomson, White and Kitley 2008; White 2007). The article argues that the analysis of the construction of journalistic reality can also be adequately done from a linguistic perspective, specifically from analysing how lexical choices journalists make betray their ideological positioning both in terms of the content as well as the context of the news report. In discussing this, the article comparatively analyses two news reports in two Zimbabwean newspapers on the death of retired General, Solomon Mujuru.