“Which foreign policy has brought success and which disgrace?” A reworking of the Attitude system in Iranian presidential debates

Due to the lens it provides to examine evaluation in language as a semiotic system, the Appraisal framework has recently been applied extensively in a wide range of contexts (e.g., educational, professional, political); however, despite the fact that its founders have considered it as an on-going project with issues still to be solved, from among the many researchers who have relied on this framework only a few have felt the need to somehow refine it. The Appraisal framework, notwithstanding its robustness, has posed challenges for analysts. Faced with the challenges the Appraisal framework poses and driven by the urge for discovering the genre-specific crafting of value-positions in televised Iranian presidential debates, we extended the sub-system of Attitude to include more delicate sub-sets of Judgement and Appreciation. This paper delineates the genre-specific modifications we brought into the framework of Attitude in light of what surfaced in the analysis along with an awareness of the existing literature in both SFL (e.g., Ngo Unsworth, 2015; White, 1998 2012) and political science and international relations (e.g., Patrick, 2007).