Endorsement, Disendorsement and Responsibility: A Corpus-based SFL Approach to Intertextual Positioning Analysis of Bangkok Post Online News on Medical Tourism

Abstract

This paper investigates on an online news website’s presentation of the medical tourism phenomenon, where news articles on medical tourism published on Bangkok Post online from 2010 to 2018 are examined for keywords (e.g. Scott & Tribble, 2006) by comparing words in the node corpus with absolute frequencies of at least 50 against their frequencies in the British National Corpus (BNC) using the statistical measure of log-likelihood (LL), Keywords with LL values of at least 200 are iteratively categorized into themes to identify which sorts of information are statistically significant in the news reports. Then informed by Appraisal Theory’s concept of intertextual positioning (White, 2015), the concordance of each keyword is analyzed for news writers’ endorsement, disendorsement, and authorial responsibility. The findings may shed some light on the discursive presentation of medical tourism in Thailand by online news writers, which may have some impact on international readers’ (potential patients) choice of a host country for their medical tourism needs.