EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE CONSTRUING ATTITUDE IN VIETNAMESE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS’ CONFESSION DISCOURSE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18173/2354-1075.2026-0068Keywords:
evaluative language, Attitude, Graduation, university confessions, social media discourseAbstract
This study examines evaluative language construing Attitude and Graduation resources associated with it in Vietnamese university students’ confession discourse, drawing on Martin and White’s Appraisal framework. The corpus comprises 500 posts selected from an initial pool of 1,200 posts published on 21 university-related confession pages between 2021 and 2025; descriptive statistics were combined with qualitative discourse analysis, and a stratified sample of 100 posts was independently coded by two researchers to refine and standardize the coding scheme. The analysis identified 911 Attitude expressions: Affect accounted for 55.21%, while negative evaluations constituted 87.60%; Judgement and Appreciation mainly targeted competence, responsibility, conduct, and the perceived reasonableness of educational arrangements. Among 5,939 Graduation resources, Force predominated, particularly quantification by number; up-scaling foregrounded experience, whereas down-scaling restricted the scope of attribution and calibrated commitment. The findings show how confession writers use evaluation to disclose experience, position themselves interpersonally, and seek affiliation, while the linguistic patterns should be interpreted as properties of the sampled corpus rather than diagnostic indicators of students’ psychological conditions.
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