Chapter published in:

The Construction of Discourse as Verbal Interaction
Edited by María de los Ángeles Gómez González and J. Lachlan Mackenzie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 296] 2018
► pp. 201–226

Lexis and grammar as complementary discourse systems for expressing stance and evaluation

Douglas Biber | Northern Arizona University, USA

Jesse Egbert | Northern Arizona University, USA

Meixiu Zhang | Northern Arizona University, USA

Although ‘stance’ and ‘evaluation’ are closely related theoretical constructs, stance is normally investigated through corpus-based methods focusing on the use of lexico-grammatical features, while evaluative language, being regarded as more context-dependent, has been investigated through the use of particular words and phrases in individual texts. This study explores the possibility that these two linguistic systems are partially complementary, with some registers relying on lexico-grammatical stance features and others on evaluative lexis. We compare the linguistic discourse styles of three opinionated/persuasive web registers: ‘Opinion Blogs’ (OB), ‘Reviews’ (RV), and ‘Descriptions-with-intent-to-Sell’ (DS). We show that OB and RV use grammatical stance devices more but DS considerably less than most other web registers. However, our detailed study of the lexical keywords found in these three registers reveals the opposite pattern of use.

Keywords: blogs, web registers, stance, evaluation, reviews, keyword analysis

Published online: 20 September 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.296.08bib

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Cited by

Cited by other publications

Larsson, Tove

2019. Grammatical stance marking across registers. Register Studies 1:2 ► pp. 243 ff.

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