In this article, we introduce a linguistic approach to studying affectivity as a fundamental feature of news journalism. By reconceptualising affectivity beyond emotive storytelling, intentional stance-taking or evaluative expression, we propose a methodology that highlights how conventions related to mediating, modulating and managing affectivity permeate journalistic genres. Drawing from conversation analysis, Bakhtinian theory of language as dialogical and notion of affective meaning-making, we investigate how selected linguistic forms and structures – namely evidential and epistemic modals and lexical items signalling affective intensity (such as emotive and evaluative words and metaphorical expressions) – participate in affective meaning-making in news journalism. A scalable computational methodology is introduced to study multiple linguistic structures in conjunction. In investigating a case study – the news reporting and commentary on a highly charged, year-long political conflict between the right-wing conservative government and the trade unions in Finland (2015–2016) – the approach allows a focus on the ways in which affectivity operates in journalistic texts in response to both generic expectations of the audience and journalistic conventions. Our findings include identification of the intertwining of strategic rituals of objectivity and emotionality, recognition of metaphoricity as a key source of affectivity and detection of different news article types having their own conventions for managing affectivity. We also observe a connection between emotive and evaluative words and the grammatical constructions used to express degrees of certainty, which suggests these modal constructions play an important part in how affectivity informs journalistic texts.

在本文中，我们介绍一种语言方法来研究将情感作为新闻新闻学的基本特征。通过超越情感叙事，有意采取立场或评价性表达来重新构想情感，我们提出了一种方法论，强调了与调解，调节和管理情感有关的公约如何渗透新闻业。通过对话分析，巴赫金语的语言理论作为对话和情感含义的概念，我们研究了如何选择语言形式和结构，即证据和认知模式以及表达情感强度的词汇项目（例如情感和评价词以及隐喻表达） –参与新闻新闻中的情感含义的产生。引入了可扩展的计算方法，以联合研究多种语言结构。在调查案例研究时-有关右翼保守派政府与芬兰工会之间长达一年之久的激烈政治冲突的新闻报道和评论（2015-2016年）-该方法可以将重点放在情感是在新闻文本中起作用的，以响应观众的普遍期望和新闻惯例。我们的研究结果包括确定客观性和情感性战略仪式的交织，将隐喻性识别为情感的关键来源以及检测具有自己的情感管理习惯的不同新闻类型。