The focus in this chapter is on the evaluative systems of attitude, as modelled in the appraisal framework. While fully accepting the validity of the model, I explore three practical issues that arise in applying it. The first concerns the question of whether affect, the core area of attitude, should be distinguished from the more general field of emotion talk, and, if so, how. The second issue arises because two related but distinct criteria are used to distinguish judgements and appreciations: the kind of entity evaluated (the target) and the value ascribed to it. As a result, there may be an apparent mismatch between these two criteria. The third difficulty can be called the ‘Russian doll’ dilemma. An expression of one category of attitude may function as a token (an indirect expression) of a different category; and that token may itself function as an indirect expression of yet another category, and so on. This poses problems for a study of evaluation which relies on quantitative analysis. I suggest my own principles to help make life a little easier for anyone engaged in analysing evaluation in text.
Hunston, Susan.1993. “Evaluation and ideology in scientific discourse.” In Register Analysis: Theory and Practice, Mohsen Ghadessy (ed), 57–73. London: Pinter.
Hunston, Susan.2000. “Evaluation and the planes of discourse: Status and Value in persuasive texts.” In Susan Hunston and Geoff Thompson (eds), 176–206.
Hunston, Susan.2011. Corpus Approaches to Evaluation: Phraseology and Evaluative Language. New York: Routledge.
Hunston, Susan and Sinclair, John.2000. “A local grammar of evaluation.” In Susan Hunston and Geoff Thompson (eds), 74–101.
Hunston, Susan and Thompson, Geoff (eds). 2000. Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jordan, Michael.2001. “Some discourse patterns and the signalling of the Assessment-Basis relation.” In Mike Scott and Geoff Thompson (eds), 159–92.
Labov, William.1972. “The transformation of experience in narrative syntax.” In Language in the Inner City, William Labov. 354–396. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sinclair, John.1988. “Mirror for a text.” Journal of English and Foreign Languages (Hyderabad, India) 1: 15–44.
Sinclair, John.2004. Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse. Edited with Ronald Carter. London: Routledge.
Thetela, Puleng.1997. “Entities and parameters in academic research articles.” English for Specific Purposes 16 (2): 101–118.
White, P.R.R.2000. “Dialogue and inter-subjectivity: reinterpreting the semantics of modality and hedging.” In Working with Dialog, Malcolm Coulthard, Janet Cotterill and Frances Rock (eds), 67–80. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Winter, Eugene.1982. Towards a Contextual Grammar of English. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Cited by (36)
Cited by 36 other publications
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura & Paula Pérez-Sobrino
2024. Developing an annotation protocol for evaluative stance and metaphor in discourse: theoretical and methodological considerations. Text & Talk 44:2 ► pp. 197 ff.
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura, Paula Pérez-Sobrino, Laura Filardo-Llamas, Carmen Maíz-Arévalo, Begoña Núñez-Perucha, Alfonso Sánchez-Moya & Julia T. Williams Camus
2024. Identifying disputants’ attitudinal variations in family mediations: A data mining approach. Discourse Studies
Yoong, Melissa & Nourhan Mohamed
2024. “I felt sad then, I feel free now”: a case for examining the constructive resistance of opted-out mothers. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal 43:5 ► pp. 849 ff.
Benítez-Castro, Miguel-Ángel, Encarnación Hidalgo-Tenorio, Katie Jane Patterson, Manuel Moyano & Irene González
2023. A review of interpersonal metafunction studies in systemic functional linguistics (2012–2022). Journal of World Languages 0:0
Elyamany, Nashwa
2023. What Buddhist wisdom is going viral? A multimodal-appraisal analysis of a selection of Jay Shetty’s digital narratives. The Social Science Journal 60:2 ► pp. 316 ff.
Jing, Yi & Qingxin Xu
2023. Danmu video as the resemiotised: An attitudinal analysis of Home Visit. Media, Culture & Society 45:4 ► pp. 753 ff.
Cao, Feng & Siew Mei Wu
2022. Evaluative Phrase-Frames and Patterns in Doctoral Thesis Conclusions. International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching 12:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Congcong, Wang
2022. Attitudinal Value of the Ideational in Institutional Discourse: Evidence from Annual Reports of Hanban and British Council. Corpus Pragmatics 6:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Dong, Min & Mengfei Gao
2022. Appraisal as co-selection and media performativity: 5G technology imaged in German news discourse. Text & Talk 42:2 ► pp. 177 ff.
2021. The values of trees and woodland: a discourse-based cross-disciplinary perspective on integrating ‘revealed’ evaluations of nature into environmental agendas. Critical Discourse Studies 18:4 ► pp. 461 ff.
Toni, Francesco De
2021. Emotion. In Analysing Religious Discourse, ► pp. 256 ff.
2021. The discursive construction of the international dispute over the East China Sea: A multimodal analysis of evaluations in online newspaper editorials in the Chinese and Japanese press. Media Asia 48:1 ► pp. 34 ff.
Bolívar, Adriana
2020. Las nociones de <i>texto</i> y <i>contexto</i> en la Lingüística Sistémico-Funcional (LSF): aplicaciones, críticas y desarrollos en América Latina. Estudios de Lingüística Aplicada :70 ► pp. 127 ff.
2019. Construing Evaluation Through Patterns: Register-specific Variations of the IntroductoryitPattern. Australian Journal of Linguistics 39:1 ► pp. 32 ff.
Miller, Donna R.
2019. Language and Literature. In The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics, ► pp. 690 ff.
2021. Affect and Emotion. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 340 ff.
Huan, Changpeng
2017. Evaluating news actors in Chinese hard news reporting: language patterns and social values. Text & Talk 38:1 ► pp. 23 ff.
Huan, Changpeng
2018. Judgement Patterns. In Journalistic Stance in Chinese and Australian Hard News, ► pp. 115 ff.
Huan, Changpeng
2018. Corpus Construction and Annotation. In Journalistic Stance in Chinese and Australian Hard News, ► pp. 53 ff.
Márquez, Aurelia Carranza
2017. A functional view on the expression of emotion – the case of Spanish emigration and the media: Politics, manipulation and stance. Discourse & Communication 11:5 ► pp. 467 ff.
Don, Alexanne
2016. “It is hard to mesh all this”: Invoking attitude, persona and argument organisation. Functional Linguistics 3:1
Su, Hang
2016. How products are evaluated? Evaluation in customer review texts. Language Resources and Evaluation 50:3 ► pp. 475 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Topics and Settings in Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 247 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 24 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.