Stance Acts in Select Nigerian and South Korean News Report on COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The widespread of COVID-19 pandemic across the globe has been a subject of discourse in the media, with different media outlets striving to report issues of the pandemic to the general public since its outbreak. The question of media objectivity in portraying the pandemic has gained and will continue to receive scholarly attention. Hence, the objectivity of the print media in relaying the pandemic crisis in Nigeria and South Korea is called into question in this article which investigates stance acts in the reportage of COVID-19 pandemic by a few select newspapers in Nigeria and South Korea. Twenty-eight extracts were purposively sampled, 7 each from Nigeria’s Daily Trust and This Day as well as South Korea’s the Korea Times and the Korea Herald respectively. This is intending to uncover the types of stance acts adopted by each newspaper, their pragmatic functions, the choice of lexico-grammatical resources for expressing stance and the objectivity of each news report in portraying the pandemic. The study draws insight from the conceptual framework of linguistic stance. The analysis shows that epistemic, deontic and affective stance acts featured in the news report. They are used to evaluate the COVID-19 pandemic, provide evidence to support the propositions made, and unveil dispositions in relation to the issue. Also, the assertive, commissive, expressive and directive speech acts serve to relay facts, indicate commitment, express feelings and issue order. Lexico-grammatical features such as modals, hedges and stance clauses signalled by verbs, adjectives and nouns function to introduce the epistemic, deontic and affective stance acts. Finally, each news report displayed a proclivity for the use of objective language in reporting the COVID-19 pandemic, even though there were very slight traces of the use of subjective language in some of the news reports.