Evaluative Adjectives Research Articles

Коммуникативные ценности гармоничного общения (по данным русской и китайской фразеологии)

The article is devoted to the linguocultural analysis of communicative values of harmonious communication presented in Russian phraseology and seen against the background of the Chinese communication culture. The relevance of the study is determined by increased conflictness in modern communications and the need to reflect national cultural traditions of communication. The material for the study are collocations with the meaning of “communicative behaviour,” extracted by the method of continuous sampling from the Russian and Chinese phraseological dictionaries (over 300 units). Phraseological units contain specific requirements prescribing the necessary communicative behaviour of addresser and addressee, who are equally responsible for the development and successful completion of the communicative interaction. The author identified the linguistic means characterizing a harmonious communication (evaluative adjectives, comparisons, direct prescriptions). Based on linguoculturological interpretation of phraseology, the author defines prescriptive standards and values for harmonious communication in Russian culture - politeness, sincerity, absence of conflict. The results of comparative analysis of the maxims of benevolence, sincerity and tolerance are presented. Similarities of the communicative requirements of the Russian and Chinese cultures are shown. The author dwells on the specific qualities of sincerity and truthfulness, determined by the Russian mentality. Special attention is paid to restraining communicative actions hindering the communication process, which are registered in the national phraseology. It is proved that a harmonious communicative behaviour is governed by the rules of speech etiquette, based on the norms of morality and national cultural traditions.

Expressing generic and transitory opinions in Greek

Abstract This paper investigates the semantics of the Greek subjective attitude verbs vrisko (‘find’) and theoro (‘consider’). I present data from Greek where both verbs embed small clauses including evaluative adjectives (‘tasty’, ‘attractive’) and I develop a tentative analysis for each verb following Sæbø’s (2009) account of find and Chierchia’s (1995) analysis for generic predicates. I propose that: a) vrisko is a stage-level subjective verb expressing transitory opinions about objects of evaluation as viewed within a particular experience situation; b) theoro is an individual-level subjective verb expressing generic opinions about objects of evaluation as realised across various experience situations. This approach explains the observed contrasts between the two verbs. Moreover, it shows that the individual- and stage- level distinction is manifested in attitude verbs and that language employs distinct verbs depending on how an object of evaluation is viewed by the relevant judge.

Evaluative Language in Lithuanian Students’ English Writing. A Study of ‘Important’ and ‘Interesting’

Critical thinking, as one of the competences to be developed at universities, requires the ability to evaluate. Though different parts of speech can fall under the category of evaluative language, adjectives are among the most frequently used means to express evaluation. The present study is limited to the use of two positive evaluative adjectives in Lithuanian learner English. It aims to analyse whether the use of “interesting” and “important” in Lithuanian students’ writing depends on the text genre, language proficiency, educational institution variables and whether it differs in NNS and NS writing. The data were obtained from the Lithuanian parts of the Corpus of Academic Learner English and the International Corpus of Learner English, the corpus of the first year students’ examination essays written at Vilnius University and comparable native English corpora. The results of the study indicate overuse of “important” and “interesting” in Lithuanian students’ corpora and highlight the different roles that the variables under consideration play in the use of the studied adjectives.

The construction of attitudinal stance

This paper is a corpus-based contrastive study of the realization of negative attitudinal stance in English and Spanish discourse through the use of evaluative adjectives. The main aim of the study is to analyse and compare the grammatical patterns in which negative evaluative adjectives occur in each language and discuss the observed cross-linguistic differences in terms of the effects that alternative linguistic realizations have in the construction of evaluative discourse. The working procedure follows a contrastive analysis methodology: description of empirical data, juxtaposition and contrast. The descriptive data have been extracted from a large comparable corpus of English and Spanish newspaper opinion discourse. The study has revealed interesting similarities and differences in the construction of Attitude in each language, which are inferred by contrasting its surface structural features.

George Ridpath’s use of evaluative adjectives as manipulative and persuasive strategies during the War of the Spanish Succession (1710-1713)

This paper analyses evaluative adjectives in George Ridpath’s political writings during the War of the Spanish Succession (1710-1713), in a corpus which comprises two journals, four years and 291 numbers, with the purpose of examining how this author used language as a weapon to shape and manipulate Great Britain’s public opinion during the Stuart period. For that, I have employed Wilson’s approach to Political Discourse Analysis (2001) and van Dijk’s polarisation (1999) as well as Allan and Burridge’s understanding of euphemism and dysphemism (1991). The results permit to value Ridpath’s contribution as a very influential but controversial pamphleteer who wrote about the War of the Spanish Succession within Great Britain’s context.

Evaluative linguistic expressions vs. fuzzy categories

In this paper, we discuss the distinction between categories characterized by verbal labels taken from a fuzzy rating scale and special class of linguistic expressions, called evaluative. The latter form a general class of expressions that includes gradable and evaluative adjectives and their hedges. First, we will provide a brief linguistic analysis of them. Then we outline basic principles for construction of the mathematical model of semantics of evaluative expressions. In Section 3 we will analyze the concepts of rating scale with verbal labels (fuzzy rating scale), their semantics and demonstrate that the latter cannot be identified with the semantics of evaluative expressions. Finally, we suggest a method for construction of fuzzy rating scales on the basis of evaluative linguistic expressions. The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate the power of fuzzy set theory and to show that it is capable of providing tools for advanced modeling of linguistic semantics.

A Corpus-based Study on Evaluation Adjectives in Academic English

As proposed by Biber et al. (1999: 966, 972), stance requires the communication of assessments and value judgments concerning the described situation by appeal to evidence (evidentiality), assessment of the degree of likelihood concerning the described situation (epistemic modality), and the arguments regarding the necessity or desirability of the situation obtaining (deontic modality). The present study investigates authorial stance in doctoral dissertations of native and non-native academic authors of English. It is designed to analyze evaluation adjectives in doctoral dissertations produced in the field of English Language Teaching, Applied Linguistics, English Language and Literature and Modern Languages between 2005 and 2012. Throughout the study, a total number of fifty-one evaluation adjectives were examined across three sets of corpora including dissertations written by native speaking academic authors of English (NAEs), Turkish-speaking academic authors of English (TAEs) and Spanish-speaking academic authors of English (SAEs). The items in question were identified through WS Tools (Scott, 2012) over three corpora, which were subsequently compared with regard to their frequency using a log likelihood test. Findings of the study have revealed that these adjectives were significantly underused by TAEs and SAEs against NAEs. The study offers a couple of possible reasons for this particular consequence and a few instructional suggestions for academic writing in a second language.

Evaluative Language in English Job Advertisements in Diachronic Perspective

The received view has it that genres are subject to historical changes with respect to their functional and language features. The purpose of this article is to examine changes in the evaluation language employed in the genre of British job advertisement, in this way revealing shifts and developments in this type of discourse practice. Drawing on evidence from the corpus of job advertisements published in the Times, the national British newspaper, in the period between 1896 and 2006, this paper proposes an analysis of evaluative language usage in three collections of job advertisements from late nineteenth, middle twentieth centuries, and the 2000s. The regularities present in the data were calculated manually for every period under consideration. The comparative analysis of the data obtained for each of the synchronic layers introduces diachronic perspective into the study by revealing changes in evaluative language throughout the periods as they are reflected in an average ratio of adjectives per text, distribution of evaluative and descriptive adjectives, frequency of the entities evaluated and semantic variation of the adjectives used to evaluate entities. The aim of the study is to understand the changing role of evaluation in the genre, the way evaluative adjectives work, the role they play in persuading the applicant.

Discriminating CEFR levels in Greek L2: a corpus-based study of young learners’ written narratives

In line with cross-linguistic research aiming at identifying criterial features that discriminate the CEFR proficiency levels, the present study investigates language elements that are core characteristics of each proficiency level for Greek L2. It is based on a graded corpus of 150 written narratives produced by young L2 learners (aged 8–14) at levels A2 to B2. This corpus was annotated with respect to a set of features at both the sentence and discourse level, such as clause subordination, connectives, modifiers and grammatical accuracy. Statistical analysis identified certain aspects of these features that discriminate language proficiency levels in L2 Greek narratives and are put forward as criterial features. These include the frequency of dependent and centre-embedded clauses, the gradual decrease of additive and the emergence of contrastive and inferential connectives, the felicitous use of clitics, as well as the use of evaluative adverbs and adjectives.

Sex Composition Disrupts the Accuracy of Women’s Metaperceptions of Partners

The effects of sex composition of dyads and surrounding others in groups on the accuracy in women’s expected evaluations (metaperceptions) were investigated using the Group Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (GAPIM). The dataset comprised 26 groups of four to six previously unacquainted participants who completed an unstructured social interaction followed by round-robin evaluations and metaperceptions on evaluative adjectives. Women expected less positive evaluations from opposite-sex partners, and this did not vary by the sex composition of surrounding others. However, women were less accurate in predictions of how they were evaluated by male partners (compared with female partners) if women were the majority in the surrounding group. Also, women formed less accurate metaperceptions of female partners when women were the minority, rather than the majority in the surrounding context. Implications for theory development in intergroup relations and contributions of the GAPIM to diversity research are discussed.

Evaluative Adjectives in Linguistic Lectures at the University of Montenegro

One of the key features of academic discourse is evaluation, a discourse category which in university lectures reflects a speaker’s attitude towards the propositional content. In this paper it is examined through a category of evaluative adjectives which has proved to signal the most salient aspects of university lecture discourse. The analysed corpus is composed of lectures in linguistics recorded at two organisational units of the University of Montenegro – the Faculty of Philosophy and the Institute of Foreign Languages. As a starting point in categorising evaluative adjectives we use a semantic division introduced by Swales and Burke (2003). The analysis also focuses on outlining the frequency of the examined categories of adjectives obtained with the help of AntConc 3.2.4.w soft ware and provides the most typical illustrations followed by a detailed discussion. The results achieved have demonstrated that the most frequent adjectives are those of relevance. On the contrary, Swales and Burke’s study has shown that adjectives of size dominate their coprus of American lectures. Furthermore, our analysis has revealed that centralised forms of all the analysed categories prevail over their polarised realisations. The results point to a conclusion that although evaluation represents a constituent part of the university lecture genre, it is not strongly emphasised, on the contrary, it acquires a more neutral dimension.

The Evaluative Lexicon: Adjective use as a means of assessing and distinguishing attitude valence, extremity, and emotionality

The language – in particular, the adjectives – individuals use can be harnessed to understand the different aspects of their attitudes. The present research introduces a novel approach to measuring attitudes that allows researchers to quantify these aspects. In Study 1, we created a list of 94 evaluative adjectives and asked participant judges to rate the implied valence, extremity, and emotionality of each adjective. This approach allowed us to quantify each adjective along these dimensions and thereby create the Evaluative Lexicon (EL). We validated the EL in Study 2 by experimentally creating attitudes toward novel stimuli in the lab and then measuring them using our tool. In Study 3, we sought to further validate the EL as well as demonstrate its practical and theoretical contributions using a natural-text repository of 5.9 million Amazon.com product reviews. Results from the Amazon.com reviews indicate that individuals use the EL adjectives in ways that further validate their ability and usefulness in measuring valence, extremity, and emotionality even within natural text. These findings, in turn, produced new theoretical contributions regarding the separability of attitude extremity and emotionality as well as their relation to summaries of both univalent and ambivalent evaluations. The findings highlight the importance of attitude emotionality for understanding attitude expressions.

Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive modification and evaluative predicates

Evaluative adjectives have often been claimed to manifest a strong, and even exclusive, preference for the nonrestrictive reading (henceforth the ‘nonrestrictive bias’ of evaluative adjectives). For those languages like French that allow both the post and pre-head positions for at least a subset of their adjectives, a frequent observation reported in support of this claim is that evaluative adjectives are often odd in post-nominal position. The argument relies on what has been called the complementarity hypothesis, namely the hypothesis that pre-head modifiers receive a nonrestrictive interpretation in Romance, while post-head modifiers receive a restrictive interpretation. An immediate problem for this argument is that evaluatives do appear in postnominal positions in corpora. One of the goals of this paper is to reconcile these data with the nonrestrictive bias and the complementarity hypothesis. The idea pursued is that a modifier can either be (non)restrictive according to the standard definitions, which are purely extensional, or be (non)restrictive with respect to a particular modal base α (thus, α-restrictive vs. α-nonrestrictive). Being restrictive or α- restrictive (respectively nonrestrictive or α-nonrestrictive) allows the modifier to appear in the post-head (respectively pre-head) position. In section 2, we recall the standard (purely extensional) definitions of (non)restrictivity. We then show that these definitions cannot distinguish between restrictive and nonrestrictive modifiers in a number of contexts, e.g. in non-partitive indefinites. In section 2.3, we introduce modal definitions of (non)restrictivity that solve the problem. Section 3 identifies the contexts in which evaluative adjectives can appear in post-nominal position and explains why, on the basis of the definitions of (α)-(non)restrictivity built in previous sections. The analysis proposed is compared with two previous accounts of the nonrestrictive bias of evaluative predicates.

Adjectifs d’évaluation de comportement

The article proposes a unified analysis of Behavior Evaluation Adjectives (BEA), like gentil ‘kind’ or prudent ‘wise’, whether the quality expressed is attributed to a human subject (Tu es vraiment gentil de nous aider ‘You are really kind to help us’) or to his/her behavior (Nous aider est vraiment gentil de ta part ‘To help us is really kind of you’). We argue that these two structures should be viewed as diathetic variants of one another, the structure with the clausal subject being the passive equivalent of the active construction with a human subject. BEAs function as part of an active complex predicate être ‘be’+A, which takes an external “agent” argument expressed by an NP+human and a direct internal argument, infinitive clause. Thus, BEAs function in all their usages as secondary predicates of “Individual level” type, providing the evaluation of a human subject as an agent.

The Formation of the Image of Top-Ranked Hotels through Real Online Customer Reviews: A Corpus-Based Study of Evaluative Adjectives as Image-Formers/Providers

This study is grounded on a corpus-based analysis of evaluative adjectives as hotel image-formers/providers conducted from a multifaceted yet complementary perspective which departs from the notion of destination image formation (Gartner, 1993; Baloglu & McCleary, 1999, Gylling, 2004 among others) focused on a specific aspect, that of the hotel of destination, and to a specific genre, the online (hotel) customer review. The corpus of study, which contains more than 250 000 words, is made up of more than 1200 online reviews of top-ranked hotels retrieved from the popular website Tripadvisor.com. WordSmith Tools 5.0 was used to analyse and categorise the evaluative adjectives in the corpus from three perspectives: firstly, adjectives were initially classified according to frequency and/or saliency criteria; secondly, in terms of their implicit degree of positivity/negativity; and thirdly, according to the kind of evaluation provided. Subsequently, the main features evaluated in any hotel online customer review (value, rooms, location, cleanliness, and service) and their frequently associated adjectival evaluative acts were analysed to determine their collocational behavior and thus the way such appraisal patterns contribute to “destination image formation”, that is, to form an impression on specific aspects of top-ranked hotels. The paper is aimed at showing that evaluative adjectives in online customer reviews are critical in the interpretation of subjective expected values, and that a correct understanding of the kind of image they transmit in the tourist-to tourist digital interaction through reviews provides an opportunity for destination marketers, in this case hoteliers, to enhance the psychological and symbolic values as well as the benefits of the destination according to improved communication strategies and language usage.

Comprehension of relevance implicatures by pre-schoolers: The case of adjectives

Research on the acquisition of relevance implicatures usually shows that it is not until age six that children learn to draw relevance inferences. However, Schulze et al. (in press) demonstrated that the ability of children to comprehend implicatures might have been underestimated due to the relatively complex and metalinguistic nature of the tasks. When implicature generation is naturally embedded in an ongoing interaction and supported by joint attention, even three-year-olds appear to succeed. The present paper develops this research path and tests comprehension of relevance implicatures based on adjectives in two experiments in which implicature reading was a necessary step in a shopping game. Experiment 1 demonstrated that five-year-olds are adult-like in drawing relevance inferences from evaluative adjectives used in argumentative contexts. Three-year-olds, although having more difficulty with negative items, still performed above chance across all conditions. Experiment 2 extended this finding to even younger children (2;6–3;6) and revealed that the presence of joint attention helps toddlers to comprehend negative utterances. Children not supported by joint attention performed at chance with indirect negative utterances, whereas children in the joint-attention condition coped equally well with positive and negative trials.

“Your argument is wrong”: a contribution to the study of evaluation in academic weblogs

AbstractAcademic weblogs are a new form of scholarly communication which provides both a space for researchers to present their ideas, observations, and reactions to others' work and a discussion forum. Although evaluation has been shown to play a prominent role in academic discourse, the function of this rhetorical device in academic blogs has not yet been studied. As part of an attempt to address this issue, the present study is aimed at identifying the types and frequency of evaluative adjectives in academic blogs and at analyzing their role in this genre. For this purpose, I adopt Thompson and Hunston's (2000: 5) definition of evaluation as “the expression of the speaker or writer's attitude or stance towards, a viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about.” The study is based on the exploration of a corpus of weblog entries and comments taken from ten different academic blogs. The results show that evaluative adjectives are rhetorically used by participants in these blogs for two purposes: (i) to construct their identity both as knowledgeable researchers and competent academic bloggers; (ii) to build and sustain solidarity relations with other members of the community and signal their allegiances.

THE SCHEMATIC STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH AND INDONESIAN RESEARCH ARTICLE INTRODUCTIONS

The article reports an investigation on the differences between the schematic structure of English and Indonesian research article introduction. By selecting thirty research articles from each group and analysing them using the CARS model (1990, 2004), this study has unravelled several differences. At the macro level, the English articles respectively have a higher percentage of reviewing items of previous research, indicating gap, and summarising methods. While their Indonesian counterparts tend to have a greater deal with making topic generalisations, presenting positive justifications, and stating the value of the present research. In addition, while the Indonesian articles have more unidentified schematic elements and lack outlining the structure of paper, the English ones demonstrate a higher degree of move reiteration. At the micro level, the English articles are characterised by the use personal deixes as self-mention, and more variation of linguistic clues in claiming centrality. On the other hand, their Indonesian counterparts are depicted by the absence of self-mention, the use of code mixing, and a major tendency in using amplifiers and evaluative adjectives in claiming centrality. These differences might be partially influenced by the writers’ culture, knowledge, editorial policy, social environment, and in certain cases, the technical problems.

Laste esimesed eestikeelsed omadussõnad

Analysis of the recordings of three boys from the ages of 18 months until 4 years acquiring Estonian naturally in differing language environments indicated that Estonian adjectives increased relatively slowly and thus were less numerous in their recording lexicons than verbs and nouns. Adjectival rate of increase appeared to be relatively independent of a child’s macro-environment (as long as there is an Estonian-speaking carer to provide sufficient input), yet it seemed to be influenced by a child’s individual linguistic abilty. The boys started qualifying their nouns with adjectives by calling things beautiful, good and bad, small and big, old and new. Antonymous pairs of adjectives and evaluative adjectives appeared early in their speech. Adjectival commonality – defined in terms of the number of the same words used by several individuals – between individual boys, the Estonian boys and children learning English, as well as the Estonian boys and adults, indicated that the observed boys’ adjectives were representative of currently spoken Estonian, as well as possibly common in the early speech of all children.

Claiming a territory: Relative clauses in journal descriptions

The study of evaluative features of language has been a productive source of insights into academic discourse in recent years, revealing the ways that persuasion is achieved in a range of genres. This research, however, has largely focused on word-level features, such as stance adverbials and evaluative adjectives (e.g. Hunston and Thompson, 2000), with the evaluative potential of clause-level resources under-explored. Nor has research had much to tell us about the more peripheral genres of the academy which are concerned with the distribution, rather than the production, of knowledge. In this paper we address both these issues by examining the role of the relative clause construction in a corpus of journal descriptions, the texts which define and endorse the goals and position of a journal. Our analysis of 200 journal descriptions in four contrasting disciplines reveals that relative clauses have an important, and perhaps surprising, role to play in this genre, functioning pragmatically as an evaluative and persuasive tool to promote academic journals.