Avaliação negativa no espaço Web: o caso de comentários online a notícias

Expressing emotions, attitudes and thoughts about certain objects, phenomena, etc. is an inherent part of our day-to-day communication as language users. To that end, we have at our disposal various lexico-grammatical resources that allow making assessments according to our beliefs and perception of the world. Despite a wide range of theoretical frameworks that study evaluation (Hyland 1994, Biber 1988, 1989, Traugott 1995, 2010, Taboada 2014, 2017), this paper gives priority to the Appraisal Theory as a theoretical tool for conducting the analysis. The Appraisal Theory, which belongs to the Systemico-Functional Linguistics (SFL) developed by Halliday (2014), aims at analyzing linguistic resources by which texts / speakers express and negotiate their emotions, judgments and evaluations. In this paper, we are particularly interested in negative evaluation in Portuguese comments posted online as a recently emerging phenomenon (Taboada, 2017). We present a quantitative analysis of our small corpus, which contains 16 comments posted by online users in response to newspaper articles of Diário de Notícias (DN). The comments have been analyzed in terms of the system of Attitude within the Appraisal framework. We have seen that negative evaluation is indeed predominant the analyzed comments, which could be a signal of negativity bias.