| The advent of the Internet era has changed the way people get information,bringing great convenience for the public.However,in the process of information dissemination,some disseminators use the highly inclusive platform to purposefully spread low-quality information,which increases the risk that the public may be misled by false information.Under these circumstances,if the public are short of information assessment ability,it will become the sufferers and disseminators of these low-quality information.This study collected 100 real online news and 100 fake online news from a database,called FakeNewsNet,in order to build two contrastive corpora of real online news(57,649 words)and fake online news(48,014 words)respectively.With the help of UAM Corpus Tool 3.0 and Rayson’s Log-likelihood calculator,based on Appraisal Theory,this paper conducts qualitative and quantitative analysis towards the two corpora,for answering the following three research questions:(1)What are the frequencies of appraisal resources in real online news and fake online news respectively?(2)What is the relationship between the use of appraisal resources and the authenticity of online news?(3)What linguistic assessment method for online news message credibility can be developed from this study?After qualitative and quantitative analysis towards each type of appraisal resources in the two corpora,as well as sample analysis based on news text,this study turns out the following findings.Firstly,there are 2,062 attitude resources,4,365 engagement resources and 1,164 graduation resources contained in the real online news corpora,and there are 1,830 attitude resources,3,877 engagement resources and 1,134 graduation resources are included in the fake online news corpora.Secondly,these appraisal resources can reflect the rationality,intentionality,impartiality,objectivity,authenticity,verifiability,authority and accuracy of news text.In addition,the systemic sample analysis shows that the credibility results of news message are consistent with their original authenticity,which indicates that appraisal resources can be effectively used to assess the quality of news message.Thirdly,based on previous findings,this study designs a linguistic assessment tool,including three assessment categories of source of voice,attitudinal expression and graduation resources,developed by the author to improve the public’s ability of assessing online news message,looking forward to lowering the risk that the general public and society are influenced by lowquality online news. |
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