The study aims at exploring evaluative language used by Time and Newsweek Magazines in portraying American superheroes. Evaluative language, according to Hunston, reflects the value system of the speaker or the writer and the community they belong to. Evaluative language also functions ‘to construct and maintain relations between the speaker or writer and hearer or reader.’ The evaluative language is observed through corpus-based semantic study by utilizing UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) to classify the semantic tags and AntConc corpora analysis software to calculate the frequency of occurrence as well as to locate the key words in context for 50 articles from both magazines. Four semantic tags for evaluation are used: A5.1 Evaluation: Good/bad, A5.2 Evaluation: True/false, A5.3 Evaluation: Accuracy, and A5.4 Evaluation: Authenticity. The results show that positivity dominates the media portrayal, marked by the dominant percentage of good evaluation semantic tag in the corpus.

Keywords: superheroes, American media, evaluative language, corpus, semantic