AN APPRAISAL OF INFERTILITY DISCOURSE ON SELECTED HEALTH NARRATIVES ON OMO FRANCA’S BLOG

Abstract

This study investigates aspects of evaluative meaning in the infertility discourse of selected health narratives on Omo Franca’s Blog (my baby testimony blogspot) using Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory as the analytical framework. The study adopts a qualitative research design, drawing its primary data from twenty-four purposively selected infertility narratives posted between 2008 and 2015. The analysis focuses on how linguistic resources of attitude, engagement, and graduation were deployed by narrators to construct evaluative meanings, negotiate interpersonal relationships, and express affective, judgmental, and appreciative stances toward their infertility experiences. The study uncovers how linguistic resources are employed by narrators to express emotion, negotiate interpersonal positions and construe attitudes towards infertility experiences. Findings reveal that the attitudinal subsystem, particularly the affect and judgment components, dominates the narratives, reflecting the narrators’ emotional turmoil, social struggles, and moral positioning within a culturally sensitive and stigmatizing context. The engagement subsystem is employed to align or disalign with social voices, while graduation amplifies the emotional intensity and social evaluation of infertility experiences. Linguistically, these evaluative resources achieve empathy, solidarity, and identity reconstruction, allowing narrators to reframe personal suffering into resilience and agency. The study contributes to discourse-analytic scholarship by foregrounding how appraisal resources shape meaning, emotion, and social positioning in digital health narratives within the Nigerian sociocultural context.