Adjective complementation patterns and judgement: Aligning lexical-grammatical and discourse-semantic approaches in appraisal research

Abstract

AbstractThis study takes a lexical-grammatical approach to exploring the evaluation of human behaviour and/or character. It uses adjective complementation patterns as the starting point to examine the lexical-grammatical resources at risk in the appraisal system ofjudgement, aiming to explore the extent to which we can arrive at the same categorization of the resources realizingjudgementif a formal or lexical-grammatical approach, rather than a discourse-semantic one, is taken. Using a corpus compiled of texts categorized as ‘Biography’ in the British National Corpus, the study, on the one hand, shows that most of the items identified can be very satisfactorily classified in terms posited in thejudgementsystem, suggesting that the nomenclature from that model is useful. On the other hand, a considerable number of items have also been identified which construe attitudes towards emotional types of personality traits, leading to the proposal of a potentially useful new judgement category and further an adjusted system ofjudgement. The heuristic potential of aligning the lexical-grammatical and discourse-semantic approaches to appraisal is further discussed.