PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

This study seeks to investigate how Bandung city, one of the foremost tourist destinations in Indonesia, and its elements (the citizens, the Mayor, and specific things or places) are evaluated by the author of a blog post entitled Bandung, The City of Pigs to ascertain the author’s attitude polarity (negative or positive). The Appraisal theory was utilized in this study to analyze an array of appraisal resources contained in the text. It is found that in general the author’s evaluation of Bandung and its elements is negative, which is linguistically realized in the three subsystems of ATTITUDE system namely APPRECIATION, JUDGEMENT, and AFFECT. In addition, it is presumed this negativity also contributes to the virality of the text as it evokes the high-arousal negative emotion of the readers i.e., anger. In our analysis, the blog post entitled Bandung, The City of Pigs went viral as it has evoked the readers’ negative emotions−namely anger–because of a high number of negative appraisal items employed in the evaluation. Implicationally, these findings are expected to raise people’s awareness of the significance of making careful judgments in evaluating to avoid potential conflicts and other disadvantages.