A Study on ‘Angry Signature' of News Anchor K: Based on Appraisal theory of systemic functional linguistics

Objectives The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Signature of anchor K, the host of MBN's news talk program “Anchor K's News fighter,” using the Appraisal theory of systemic functional linguistics. Through this analysis, we will examine how speakers can strategically utilize appraisal language for specific communicative purposes and what effects they can achieve. Methods Among the <News fighter> programs hosted by anchor K, we randomly sampled the broadcasts containing keywords such as ‘angry anchor’, ‘rant’, ‘rave’, ‘burst’, ‘excitement’, ‘criticism’, ‘anger’, ‘big anger’, and ‘extreme anger’, and analyzed 354 sentences in 5 talk programs, divided into categories such as Attitude, Engagement, Graduation, as well as Mood, Journalist KEYs. Results The anchor strategically utilized various ‘angry’ languages to put the viewers in the same position as himself. That is, [dissatisfaction (displeasure)], [insecurity (disquiet, surprise)], [unhappiness], etc. were mainly used in Affect, [-propriety] was used in Judgement, and [-quality] was used in Appreciation. In Engagement, subjective judgments were presented as factual propositions, while rhetorical interrogatives were used to persuade viewers. Various intensity evaluation resources were utilized to amplify the Graduation of the Attitude. Finally, these evaluative features of anchor K's anchor utterances are also differentiated from the typical journalistic KEYs, as they share all the typical evaluative patterns of the reporter's voice, contributor's voice, and commentator's voice. Conclusions This study sheds light on a neglected aspect of the Signature languages and analyzes the characteristics of ‘Angry Signature’ languages through detailed utterance text analysis. We hope that this study will lead to further research on personal evaluative language in various dimensions.