A Theory of Evaluative Discourse: Towards a Graph Theory of Journalistic Texts

Abstract

Charles E. Osgood and his colleagues developed a technique for content analysis called `Evaluative Assertion Analysis' (Osgood, 1956). An elaboration of the technique will be presented here. Sentences are split up into nuclear sentences, which are predicating something about the relation between meaning objects. Meaning objects might be political actors, empirical variables, attributes or abstract philosophical notions such as `the good' or `the world'. By uttering nuclear sentences, meaning objects are associated or disassociated. A computer program, CETA, has been developed which applies graph theory for combining these nuclear sentences in order to detect the structure of discourse.