Discourse motivation

• We do not think of a word and start uttering
• We mostly start with a communicative need
• An apology, a criticism, an expression of sympathy,, and act of informing or persuading.
• These all come under the general heading of the interpersonal sphere of communication
• They are linked to subjectivity, persuasion and argumentation. They concern the choices made and the resources used to present information and opinions in order to achieve a particular effect. That is to say they are part of the strategies involved in persuasive discourse.

• They concern the choices made and the resources used to present information and opinions in order to achieve a particular effect.
• That is to say they are part of the strategies involved in persuasive discourse, getting things done with language.
• We have seen some of these in action already
• Repeated sequences, frequent or salient in a particular text type, linked to a communicative need and of which the resources are described elsewhere by dictionaries or grammars
• The accumulation points us to what is happening in the discourse

• hyperbole: in newspaper discourse related to promotional content.
Keywords contained lexical sets which pointed to the evaluative patterns
• dialogistic positioning: witnesses in a public inquiry choosing resources for focus, emphasis, contrast, strategic vagueness.
• politeness, face-work : in institutional discourse,
• Today we are going to look at: Evaluation, stance, appraisal,
• Later in the course we will look at: irony, figurative language,

• very few discourses are merely purely ideational and in all normal circumstances speakers/writers both give experiential messages about the world and simultaneously express their own evaluative attitude to it, approving or critical.
• For the what and, especially, the why of communication, we need to look at another behavioural phenomenon, namely, evaluation.
• Persuading with language
• Evaluation: the engine of persuasion.

• In addition to communicating propositional content, speakers and writers commonly express personal feelings, attitudes, value judgements, that is they express a stance
• (Biber et al 1999, ch 12)
• Resources:
• Paralinguistic
• Lexical
• grammatical

• Semantic Domains Subsystems Values and resources
•
• Attitude
•
• Engagement
• Graduation
Affect/Judgement/ Inscribed meanings/
Appreciation Evoked meanings
Monogloss/
Heterogloss
Focus/ Force
• Summary of the Systems and subsystems of the Appraisal Model.

Linguistic resources for persuasion

• ‘Evaluation is the broad cover term for the expression of the speaker or writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about. That attitude may relate to certainty or obligation or desirability of any number of variables’
Hunston & Thompson 1999

• Evaluation is a significant element of our lives: as a device for interpreting the world and offering this evaluation to others, it pervades human behaviour: when we interact with the world around us, we perceive, categorize and evaluate what we encounter. Our short term evaluations turn into long term values.
• (Bednarek, M. Evaluation in Media Discourse )

• The most obvious function is to tell the reader what the writer thinks or feels about something.
• Every act of evaluation expresses a communal value system and every act of evaluation goes towards building up that value system. This value system is in turn a component of the ideology of the society that has produced the text.

• The second function of evaluation is to build and maintain relations between writer and reader
• Evaluation can be used to manipulate the reader, to persuade him or her to see things in a particular way

• very few discourses are merely purely ideational and in all normal circumstances speakers/writers both give experiential messages about the world and simultaneously express their own evaluative attitude to it, approving or critical.

“the indication that something is good or bad” (from the point of view of the speaker/writer)
Hunston 2004:
A highly inclusive superordinate including every possible form of expressing attitudinal meanings.
Two broad semantic domains Affect and Modality

The persuader uses evaluative language to convince his or her audience that their own opinions are good, alternative ones are not good, that their proposals are worthy and logical
(that is, good), those of their opponents illogical or dangerous (that is, bad), that they themselves are honest and trustworthy (good) and maybe that others who disagree with them are not (bad).

• signalling one’s evaluation has two major functions. First of all, it expresses group belonging by (seemingly) offering a potential service to the group by warning of bad things and advertising good ones.
• It is therefore important to identify who is evaluating whom or what

• Moreover, it can assure an audience that the speaker/writer shares its same value system. In this way it helps ‘to construct and maintain relations between the speaker or writer and hearer or reader’
(Thompson and Hunston 2000: 6
• It is therefore important to be aware of the relationships and the participants in the discourse

1. To express the speaker/writer’s opinion and in so doing to reflect the value system of that person and their community
2. To construct and maintain relations between speaker/writer and hearer/reader (interpersonal)
3. To organise the discourse (textual)

• The goodness and the badness can, of course, come in many forms, we can use a two-term Linnaean-style binomial notation in describing prosodies, for example:
• [good: pleasurable], [good: profitable], [good: being in control]; [bad: dangerous], [bad: difficult], where the colon is to be read ‘because’.

• Bednarek’s (2006) investigation of evaluation in media discourse, based on a small corpus of news items, employs a set of parameters that includes:
• importance, expectedness, comprehensibility,
• necessity , reliability, emotivity (good or bad)

evaluation can be implicit or ‘conceptual’, with no obvious linguistic clues, exploiting the audience’s ability to recognize a good – or bad – thing when they see it.
No linguistic clues
Goal orientated
Based on what we recognize to be desirable

• Lexical
• Grammatical
• Discourse /Textual

• Lexical
• Adjectives: splendid, terrible, surprising…
• Adverbs: happily, unfortunately, plainly…
• Nouns: success, failure, tragedy…
• Verbs: succeed, fail, win, lose…

• Grammatical e.g.
• Superlatives: the best, the worst…Comparatives: better, worse …
• Choice of tense:
• “Skinner (1957) argued that language was learned through a process of stimulusresponse, with large amounts o f controlled repetition. Chomsky (1959) argues that language could never be learned in this way, and that we are all endowed at birth with a language acquisition device”
• the thematised it structure (it is frightening to think that…)
(From Batstone, 1994)

• Transitivity, which tells us who does what to whom largely by placing participants in a particular order and thus assigning responsibility – and often blame - for an action, can generally be seen as combining grammatical and textual evaluation.

Discourse / Textual
John argued with Sue
Sue argued with John
John and Sue argued
The words in red are themes

• Discourse / Textual
In newspaper editorials the most important evaluation is placed at the end.

To complain that there's too much swearing on TV isn't prissy or prudish but a recognition that standards could be higher.
Parents increasingly feel under siege as children are able to watch shows with bad language in bedrooms or on the internet.
This is why the culture spokesmen of the three main political parties added their voices to the Daily Mirror's call to clean up TV.
Swearing in the proper context at the right time will always be part of broadcasting.
But producers must ask themselves if it is really necessary instead of just nodding through expletives.
(Mirror)

Guardian
In itself, the fact that a majority of the country either opposes or is sceptical towards his policy on Iraq is not necessarily a reason for Tony Blair to change course If a particular policy is right, then a minister is entitled to stick with it in the face of opposition, to trust to his own judgment and to take the consequences….
But Mr Blair's view of the crisis - and of the role he is playing
- remains dangerously double-edged. Mr Blair's whole approach on Iraq may be put to its ultimate test very soon, ...
US approach towards the Iraqi regime.</FP>

• In retrospect, the solemnity – and to modern eyes and ears, pomposity – of the politics and media of the past may be seen as in part a reflection of the current or very recent reasons to be be serious: the daily expectation of invasion or death.
• Similarly, the frivolity and triviality of much modern discourse … is the product of a decade in which nothing seems to matter very much …
(Guardian)

obstinate, stubborn, firm, decisive, resolute, pig-headed
Same basic meaning – denotation – different connotations
Our choice of word is therefore also an evaluation

• Averred evaluations are affirmed by the speaker as his own
• Attributed where the author assigns the responsibility for the evaluation to someone else.
• The play of evaluative voices can become quite complex in a text.

• Not all evaluations are expressed equally
• Evaluations an be strengthened or weakened according to the speaker’s purpose.
• It is interesting to identify the number of different linguistic resources involved in the graduation of evaluation

Upscaling and downscaling of attitudinal or evaluative meaning

• Attitudes and subjective meanings can be expressed with more or less positivity or negativity
• There are various ways of doing this
• You can grade by intensity or by amount (force)
• And you can grade by preciseness of category boundaries or prototypicality (focus)

• You can increase focus by using intensifiers
• True, real, genuine
• Really, very, genuinely
• You can lessen focus by hedging:
• Kind of, sort of, a bit, -ish

• Force = degree of intensity
• Slightly, somewhat, a bit, rather,
• Are all downtoners and lessen intensity
• Greatly, very, absolutely
• Are intensifiers which increase

• These increase force to the highest possible intensity:
• Utterly, totally, thoroughly, absolutely, completely, perfectly
• These are considered to be grammatical intensifiers since they belong to a closed set and have relatively little referential meaning

• Some intensification can be done by lexical means:
• Ice cold
• Crystal clear
• Deliriously happy
• Ridiculously easy

• Warm – hot- scalding
• Contented – happy – joyous
• Trickle – flow – flood
• Glance – look - scrutinise

• You can also intensify by repeating the same lexical item
• It’s hot, hot, hot
• A tiny, tiny,little baby
• Or by semantic repetition via synonyms
• He’s, dumb, stupid, idiotic, cretinous and totally brainless

• The way a person uses up and down scaling can be part of their personality.
• It can be used by authors to construct character
• It can be used by journalists to construct their persona with their public
• It is an important part of the expression of opinions and of certainty and uncertainty

• Is the evaluation positive or negative?
• What is being evaluated?
• Who is responsible for the evaluation? i.e. is it the author or is the evaluation attributed to someone else?
• If attributed, is the evaluation evaluated?
• How is the evaluation carried out? (linguistically, covertly, by figurative language?)

• Biber et al. (1999) Longman grammar of spoken and Written English
• Hunston and Thompson (eds) 2000, Evaluation in Text: Authorial
Stance and the construction of discourse. Oxford: OUP.
• Martin, J.R. 2000. Beyond exchange: Appraisal systems I English. In
Evaluation in Texts: Authorial stance and the construction of
discourse, Hunston, S. and Thompson, G. (eds):142-175, Oxford:
Oxford University Press
• Martin, James / White, Peter 2005. The Language of Evaluation:
Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
• White, P.P.R. 2002. Appraisal: the language of attitudinal evaluation
and intersubjective stance. URL www.grammatics.com/Appraisal .
• White, Peter 2003. Beyond Modality and Hedging. A Dialogic View of the Language of Intersubjective Stance. Text 23/2, 259-284.
• Bednarek, M. 2006 Evaluation in media discourse Continuum.
• Cockcraft R and Cockcraft S. Persuading People Macmillan 1992