Evaluation in the art-historical research article

Abstract

This paper attempts to isolate some of the aspects in which the evaluative language most typical of research articles produced within the discipline of art history differs from the evaluation prevalent in academic discourse in other fields. Working mainly within the framework of Systemic-Functional Grammar, it tests two of the models employed by linguists in the current discussion of evaluation and academic discourse [Swales 1990 on Introduction sections and Hunston 1993 on reporting verbs [Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis. English in academic and research settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Hunston, S. (1993). Professional conflict. Disagreement in academic discourse. In M. Baker et al. (Eds.). Text and technology. In honour of John Sinclair. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: Benjamins, 115–134]], on three texts, taken from recent issues of specialized journals. It concludes that art-historical description seems to find its “experiential signature” [Matthiessen, C. (1995). Lexicogrammatical cartography: English systems. Tokyo: International Language Sciences Publishers. p. 360] in the alternation and logicosemantic interdependence of material and relational process types, and that a peculiarity of art-historical discourse, considered from the point of view of the social or interactive construction of knowledge, seems to be a form of non-propositional report or projection of interpretative evaluations, typically through the use of a mental or verbal process verb followed by the preposition as.