The Discourse of Corruption: Appraisal in Indonesian Media

Abstract

This article discusses corruption case as a discourse. Appraisal theory proposed by Martin and White (2005) is used to analyze the data taken from the Jakarta Post, an Indonesian newspaper written in English. The theory is an extension of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistic. It offers the interpersonal relations between participants involved in the context. Appraisal in terms of attitude, engagement, and graduation is critically used to evaluate the collected data. The result of the study shows that the use of strong judgment as indicated by the absence of modality shows that the appraisers try to get public support.