Evaluative Lexis Research Articles

Integrated instruction of Appraisal Theory and rhetorical moves in literature reviews: an exploratory study

Abstract An effective literature review (LR) should evaluate relevant sources to justify the author argument; this important sub-genre has challenged many graduate students. Appraisal Theory has been applied to examine evaluations in academic writing, but seldom have studies probed into its pedagogical benefits. To improve graduate students’ competence of source evaluation in LRs, we integrated Attitude, an essential component of Appraisal Theory, with instruction of rhetorical moves in LRs. We offered asynchronous workshops on how Attitude is realized across various LR rhetorical moves and provided high frequency evaluative lexis and sentences to scaffold students’ learning. Analyses of the participants’ reflection posts and their original and revised LR papers revealed multiple benefits and some challenges and suggestions regarding this novel instructional approach. This SFL-informed, genre-based pedagogical exploration showcases the value of integrating Appraisal Theory-Attitude and rhetorical moves in LR instruction to help novice academic writers compose stronger LRs with meaningful source evaluation.

Wyznaczniki tabloidyzacji popularnonaukowego dyskursu historycznego w kanale serwisu YouTube „Historia bez Cenzury”

Although many studies have been carried out regarding the tabloidisation of opinion forming media, it has not yet been examined whether the tabloidisation process applies to popular scientific discourse on historical topics on YouTube and, if so, whichdeterminants of this process can be identified. This article pursues this objective by reviewing the content and style of the Historia bez Cenzury [History without Censorship] channel. The main analytical categories used were personalisation and sensationalism.The analysis of the content made it possible to see to what extent personalisation and sensationalism are present within the subject matter of, Historia bez Cenzury [History without Censorship], while the analysis of the style identified the stylistic determinants of the two identified mechanisms of tabloidisation. The results allow us to conclude that, in terms of the subject matter, the potential for personalisation and sensationalism is exploited equally on the channel. In terms of stylistic solutions, personalisation is achieved by depicting the privacy of historical figures using lexis typical of this human sphere. In addition, politics is portrayed through the prism of human relationships, which is served by saturating the text with names, surnames, and names of professions or positions. Simplifications are also applied (narrative, colloquialisms, dialogicality in the youtuber-viewer relationship). Sensationalism ismainly materialised at the level of content, whereas within the style, it is executed by means of an emotionally charged and highly evaluative lexis. Comparison of the determinants of tabloidisation with the characteristics of historical discourse on YouTube and with those of popular science discourse indicates mutual influences, evident at the level of content and style. The means specific to tabloidisation and atypical of the other discourses discussed emerge as the exposure of the privacy of historical figures and the dialogicality used in their description. The process of tabloidisation is thus evident in, Historia bez Cenzury [History without Censorship].

Dialogicity in Individual and Institutional Scientific Blogs

The paper focuses on variation across institutional and individual scientific blogs, i.e., blogs that are managed by journals, magazines or associations involved in the dissemination of scientific information and blogs that are managed by individual researchers. Using comparable corpora of posts from different scientific disciplines, look in particular at markers of dialogicity, i.e., the representation of participants (markers of self-reference, reader-reference, as well as representation of the scientific community and markers of attribution), markers of communicative action (organizational units and metastatements), and evaluative dialogue (evaluative lexis and dialogic contraction or expansion). Concordance analysis of keywords and key-phrases (as calculated by Wordsmith Tools 8.0) shows that blogs managed by individual scientists emphasize personal voice and interpersonal elements, while institutional blogs are comparatively more informational. Dialogicity markers are shown to contribute to defining how bloggers manage subjective and intersubjective positioning and construct their credibility, thus defining the nature of their relation to the audience and ultimately the functions of blogging.

Worlds of evidence

Abstract The Hillsborough football stadium disaster (1989) in Sheffield, UK, led to the deaths of 97 football fans and resulted in the longest jury case in British legal history (2016). This article examines the witness statements of two Sheffield residents who claim to have attended the match. Using a mixed-methods approach that incorporates a cognitive linguistic framework (Text World Theory) with visualisation software (VUE) we consider both form and function of a number of linguistic features, such as meta-narrative, evaluative lexis, syntax, and modality to investigate how institutional voices permeate and potentially distort layperson narratives. Our analysis casts doubt on the veracity of the statements and raises questions about what can be considered evidential in a forensic investigation.

Making death (in)different: discursive legitimation in death trials

ABSTRACT Adopting Van Leeuwen’s model of legitimation, this study critically scrutinizes the ways in which the State validates a death sentence and uncovers patterns of legitimizing strategies, along with their lexico-grammatical manifestations in the penalty phase of capital trials, including moralization, rationalization and authorization. The findings reveal that moralization plays a part in constructing “us-them” boundaries through negative evaluative lexis, agency-oriented transitivity patterns, as well as oppositional reference terms. The use of rationalization, observed in reason and purpose clauses as well as legal lexis and future predicates, emphasizes the legal ideology of facticity, impartiality, and objectivity at the expense of humanistic consideration of the person on trial. Authorization bestows power by incorporating various authoritative voices as well as the jurors’ verdicts in the guilt phase of the trial. It is argued that in their legitimating practice, the State denies capital defendants the full consideration that the law requires and fails to differentiate and justify the necessity of the lethal choice over life imprisonment. This, in turn, potentially leads to the creation of death-inclined jurors.

The newsworthiness of Li Na—A critical comparative analysis of Chinese and international news media

This paper compares the discursive construction of newsworthiness between Chinese and international media in their English-language news reporting about the Chinese tennis player, Li Na. Adopting corpus linguistic methods, discursive news values analysis framework (DNVA) and a modified network of social actor representation, this paper examines news values through key words, naming strategies and evaluative lexis in four news outlets from China, Britain, Australia and the United States. Li Na's Eliteness is enhanced through constructions of Superlativeness, Positivity, Impact and Unexpectedness in all news outlets. However, the international media highlight individualism and Li Na's rebelliousness in the face of systemic change in Chinese sporting culture, while Chinese media emphasizes collectivism and nationalism and Li Na's responsibility towards the nation. The corpus-assisted discourse analysis reveals the ideological forces that are at play in positioning her in relation to the roles and responsibilities she faces as she negotiates competing sports systems in China.

Storytelling in English and Russian-language lecture discourse


 The advantages of using storytelling as a communication strategy are currently discussed in marketing, psychology, advertising, medicine, and education. It is described as an inborn skill that people relate to and which makes people listen. Storytelling is also described as an educational method (Dumović 2006, Pedersen 1995) and as a communication tool (Dahlstrom 2014, Sundin 2018) that can be used widely in education. The purpose of this paper is to analyze features and functions of storytelling used in academic lectures. For this purpose, three lecturers in Russian and three lecturers in English were analyzed. By means of a mixed-method approach, including discourse analysis and content analysis, it was established that all the lecturers used storytelling as a communication strategy for explanatory and contact-establishing purposes. The conclusion is made that storytelling was used by the Russian and the English-language lecturers to provide their audience with clear and engaging explanations. The lecturers constructed their stories using factual information, emotional and evaluative lexis, verbs of action, as well as discursive strategies that helped them to engage the audience in the topic of the lecture (e.g., the inclusive pronoun we and different kinds of questions). Though the stories have much in common, some differences between the stories in Russian and in English are identified. Based on these results, it is suggested that further contrastive studies of storytelling in academic settings can benefit those who are planning on presenting to an international audience or preparing to teach in an intercultural context.

British and Australian Corporate Communication: A Socio-Linguistic Perspective

In this study, the corpora of British and Australian corporate communications were compared with the aim of specifying their sociolinguistic features in the context of five lexical and stylistic markers: professional jargon, as well as expressive, colloquial, uncodified and evaluative lexis. Lexical and stylistic characteristics of corporate communication from the point of view of a sociolinguistic approach were analyzed using transcripts of British and Australian communicative corporate interactions. The methods of continuous sampling, comparative, lexical-stylistic and sociolinguistic analysis were implemented to process an assembled corpus of 158 authentic transcripts. Based on the results of the analysis, quantitative data were compared, reflecting the volume of use of the indicated lexical-stylistic markers in the two samples. Quantitative data were subsequently analyzed to determine sociolinguistic characteristics that can be assessed as specific features of the communicative behavior of British and Australian superiors in dealing with subordinates. For each of the markers of lexical-stylistic differentiation under consideration, the two samples analyzed in the work showed differing results of a varied and at the same time exponential degree of discrepancy.

Nazwy stacji drogi krzyżowej (przemiany struktury i funkcji w XX wieku)

The names of stations in the Way of the Cross may be used as titles of pictures and sculptures, each corresponding to a particular event in the Passion of Christ, or as titles of meditations. The article focuses on the second meaning, but the trends of the development of both kinds of names are similar. The study is based on material consisting of about 200 texts of the service that have been published from the beginning of the 20 th century to the present (2020). The purpose of the article is to describe the changes that have taken place in the 20 th century, a period of particularly turbulent changes in religious discourse. The article deals with the function, syntactic structure and features of style, such as the use of archaic or colloquial vocabulary. These properties are considered in connection with social and cultural changes. At the beginning of the analyzed period, it was customary to use relatively long titles, which informed the participant or reader about a particular event using expressive and evaluative lexis. Those titles gradually gave way to short, schematic names. Since the Second Vatican Council, titles of a new type have appeared. Their purpose is to attract the attention of the recipient. They are based on a riddle, a contrast, allusions, etc. Therefore, the recipient derives satisfaction from deciphering the puzzle or finding the source of the quote or allusion. These phenomena are known from research on the language of press or fiction, but they can also be linked to current trends in the so-called new evangelization.

“The authors have wasted their time...”: Genre features and language of anonymous peer reviews

Abstract The anonymous peer review is an unpublished pre-publication review which evaluates research articles submitted to journals. This type of a review plays a special role in the genre landscape of Anglophone research by ensuring its appropriate quality and ethical standards. By performing this role, the peer review also realizes a didactic potential, as it motivates researchers to improve their investigations. This paper extends the existing research on the anonymous peer review and aims to deepen our understanding of this genre by analysing the overall functional organization of peer review texts and their prominent linguistic features shaped by three communicative functions ‒ “gatekeeping”, evaluative, and didactic. It also attempts to compare the characteristics of peer reviews in two research fields ideologically and epistemologically distant from each other ‒ applied linguistics and applied mathematics. The methodological framework of the study combines Swales’s move analysis and a functional stylistic perspective developed within the East European linguistic context. The analysis has revealed a three-move structure of review texts and disclosed the roles of interpersonal markers, evaluative lexis and four types of directives in the realization of the communicative functions of the genre. The typologies of reviewers’ comments and evaluative acts in reviews have also been suggested. Furthermore, the study has brought to light some quantitative and qualitative differences between the texts in two disciplines. It is anticipated that awareness of the linguistic conventions of anonymous peer reviews analysed in the paper will help researchers to perceive this genre as a valuable source of professional assistance and enlightenment.

Two-layer reading positions in comments on online news discourse about China

Reading experience is viewed as ‘interactive and negotiable’ for different reading positions are created in readers’ responses to the same news report. To understand the differences between ‘ preferred reading’ and actual readings, this article, drawing on the context models and the Appraisal framework, analyzes 785 readers’ comments attached to 23 hard news stories sourced from the China Daily mobile application (APP) and the People’s Daily Online website. The study combines corpus semantic tagging analysis for readers’ choices of evaluative lexis with a manual analysis of Appraisal resources for reading position construction based on a whole text perspective. The results show that readers are likely to use Appraisal resources strategically to defend their own opinions against other commenters or affiliate with large numbers of potential readers without commenting. Furthermore, comments were found to be directed either at the text or at other commenters, and through this a number of different reading positions were revealed. The readers’ context models are the cognitive link between discourse properties and social strategies in the process of news understanding.

"We are Proud to be a Leading Company with Global Reach and Worldwide Impact": Positively Evaluative Lexis in the Language of Recruitment Advertising

Companies’ positive self-presentation has become an essential part of job advertising and helps employers attract potential applicants for the vacancies they are offering. This paper focuses on the various forms of positively evaluative lexis that appears in the company profiles cited on the employment website Monster.com. Evaluative or loaded words can be defined as words that evaluate reality either in a positive or a negative way, thus evoking in people a positive or a negative attitude towards a particular subject, in this case the potential employer. The analysis is both qualitative and quantitative and is based on the three-pronged approach, i.e. the combination of manual analysis of individual texts, small-scale corpus analysis and large-scale corpus analysis. It is based primarily on Appraisal Theory, focusing predominantly on the category of attitude expressed in the vocabulary used. However, the analysis has shown that the persuasive techniques of employers trying to attract applicants are rather complex and it has proved necessary to take into account notions from other theories, namely Orientational Metaphor and the concept of the so-called Purr Words, i.e. words whose conceptual meaning is backgrounded by its positive connotations. This concept has recently been developed mostly under the name of Schlagwort within the field of Politolinguistik in Germany, but, as the analysis has shown, can usefully be transferred from political discourse to corporate discourse, including the discourse of recruitment. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.33.0.20081

TRANSLATION OF AXIOLOGICAL VOCABULARY AS EXEMPLIFIED IN THE NOVEL OF M. BULGAKOV “MASTER AND MARGARITA”

This article deals with special translation technique of emotionally evaluative lexis as means of image creation and various ways of reproduction of author’s intention. The examples of translation of different intentions were analyzed and ways of reproduction of the source text into English. It was concluded that it is necessary to keep the author’s intention taking into account social, political, economic phenomena, inherent to the age of the opus.

RETRACTED Defamation Strategy Implementation in the German Political Discourse

RETRACTEDThe main definitions of political discourse are introduced in this article. The author also suggests her own definition of this term. The participants of political discourse use various communicative strategies in order to influence opponents. The article reviews various definitions of communicative strategy term. The author gives her own definition of communicative strategy term and describes the main political discourse strategies. The purpose of the article is to review defamation strategy implementation and to identify its role in political discourse of Germany based on Bundestag's political wrangling. The author describes the main tactics and conversational turns of defamation strategy and its development in German politicians' speech image. Defamation strategy is one of the leading strategies in any aggressive verbal behavior discourse. The research describes main communicant's intentions by using of defamation strategy. The addresser uses this kind of strategy to offend the opponent's positive image aiming to undermine opponent's credibility and to reduce his significance at the political stage. There are following tactics of defamation strategy: offence, accusation, jeer. The article reviews the functioning of named tactics in political discourse of Germany. The article describes special aspects of above listed tactics, distinguishes terms of offence and accusation, gives examples from Bundestag's political speeches. Every tactic has its conversational turns, that are realized by various linguistic means. The article analyses political comments as an evaluative lexis subject. It also suggests analysis of such turns as intensification, comment's metaphoricity, comparative constractions, that promote better perlocutionary effect.

The Lisbon Treaty and the British Press: A Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis of Evaluation Resources

This paper is based on the results of an earlier research which has proved that metaphors can be employed by the British press to construe the event of the Lisbon treaty ratification and might be a useful linguistic tool to explore different attitudes towards that event (Nasti 2010). On the premises that metaphors are connected to evaluation as they are manifestations of the writer’s or speaker’s intentions, the present paper will investigate those evaluative resources that have been found to co-occur with the metaphors previously analyzed in order to explore how the British press uses these resources to construe the event of ratification and to what extent it presents a similar description or attributes similar roles to the European leaders. This paper is divided into six sections. The first section provides a general overview of the main stages towards the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. The second, after giving a definition of evaluation, briefly describes the results of the previous research. The third part provides information on data collection and the theoretical background. The fourth and the fifth sections deal with the analysis of the evaluative lexis. The conclusions indicate that metaphors and evaluation are both used to create a coherent text and image of the ratification issue.

The Use of Appraisal Theory to Analyze Thai Newspaper Commentaries

This study explores Thai newspaper commentaries focused on the disruption of the ASEAN Summit on April 11, 2009. The objective of the present study is to examine lexical strategies employed by appraisal theory, a tool to analyze the attitudes expressed in newspaper commentaries in greater depth. The data of this study was obtained from thirty-two newspaper commentaries retrieved from nine online newspapers: Banmuang, Dailynews, Khaosod, Komchadluek, Manager, Matichon, Naewna, Posttoday and Thaipost. The results reveal that the commentators made use of both positive and negative emotional responses through either adjectives, noun phrases or verb phrases in terms of affect, which deals with the expression of emotion. Under judgement, which deals with moral assessments of behavior, the commentators judged people’s behavior either positively or negatively through either adjectives, adverbs, noun phrases, verb phrases or metaphors as well as appreciation which deals with aesthetic assessments. With respect to attitude, a resource of language that enables commentators to express their attitude, the Thai newspaper commentaries examined contained predominantly negative evaluative lexis. Negative lexical items make the commentaries more intense and emotional for readers because of the news value of negativity, which focuses on political conflict in the Thai context. In the graduation category of appraisal, which is concerned with gradability, the explicit attitudes occurred with grading up rather than grading down. In the force subcategory, which relates to adjusting the degree of an evaluation, the commentators achieved intensification through isolation, infusion, repetition and metaphor, and achieved quantification through quantity, which is encoded as number and extent in time and space in order to enhance readers’ agreement with the commentators’ attitudes. Under focus, which relates to adjusting the boundaries of a categorical meaning, most stances represent a sharpening of the attitudinal entity rather a softening one.

Evaluation in Tenure and Promotion Letters: Constructing Faculty as Communicators, Stars, and Workers

This article examines a little-studied review genre of academe: letters written for faculty retention, promotion, and tenure (RPT). Given their centrally evaluative nature, these documents have potential to illuminate academic community values, particularly those related to faculty work. Of specific interest in this study is the evaluative language that RPT letter writers use to review three core areas of faculty performance: teaching, research and service. To this end, the author examined positive evaluative lexis in 95 RPT letters written for 11 faculty members from 8 US universities. The analysis revealed that letter writers assessed faculty in terms of seven key dimensions of their work (presentation, expertise, conscientiousness, affect, prestige, uniqueness, and productivity) and that these dimensions clustered in different ways across the three work areas. What emerged were three distinct ideals of faculty performance, which both promote and obscure realities of faculty work. In addition, while negative evaluation was sometimes expressed directly, it was typically mitigated, pointing to community concerns with politeness when evaluating colleagues.

“This Argument Fails for Two Reasons…”: A Linguistic Analysis of Judicial Evaluation Strategies in US Supreme Court Judgments

The centrality of argumentation in the judicial process is an age-old acquisition of research on legal discourse. Notwithstanding the deep insights provided by legal theoretical and philosophical works, only recently has judicial argumentation been tackled in its linguistic dimension. This paper aims to contribute to the development of linguistic studies of judicial argumentation, by shedding light on evaluation as a prominent aspect in the construction of the judge’s argumentative position. Evaluation as a deep structure of judicial argumentation is studied from a discursive point of view entailing the analysis of a sample of authentic judicial language. Evaluative lexis is investigated within a single genre of judicial discourse, i.e. judgments, instantiated by a corpus of US Supreme Court judgments. Findings show that judges use diversified strategies to take stance as they organise their argumentative discourse: from easily recognisable verbal and adjectival tools to more finely-grained discourse elements such as the encapsulating pattern ‘this/these/that/those + labelling noun’.

The Trial of the Expert Witness

This article reports on forensic letters written by physicians specializing in identifying children who have experienced maltreatment. These writers face an extraordinary exigence in that they must provide an opinion as to whether a child has experienced abuse without specifically diagnosing abuse and thus crossing into a legal domain. Their credibility was also at issue because, in this jurisdiction, child abuse identification was not recognized as a medical subspecialty and because the status of expert witnesses is currently being challenged. Through an analysis of 72 forensic letters combined with interview data from six letter writers and five letter readers, we determined that these writers used linguistic and rhetorical strategies that allowed these letters to function as boundary objects or objects that traverse several communities of practice. The most salient strategy was the use of evaluative lexis—adjectives and adverbs which allowed for a range of interpretations and constrained those interpretations at the same time.

Promotional (meta)discourse in research articles in language and literary studies

It is now widely recognized that self-promotion in academic discourse varies across disciplines. Whereas most analysts focus on publicization techniques in natural and social sciences, the humanities have received much less attention. This article investigates the strategies associated with promotional (meta)discourse in the humanities. In particular, it compares and contrasts research articles in language and literary studies published in North American academic journals during 2001–2006. This inquiry demonstrates that in both disciplines, scholars utilize two rhetorical strategies to publicize their work: (1) positive evaluation of their own study and of those investigations in which the current study is grounded; and (2) negative evaluation of dissenting views. A combination of both strategies is used to widen the gap between the writer’s contribution and alternative treatments. Lexicogrammatical and discourse devices employed in both disciplines include evaluative lexis, coordination, comment clauses, personal pronouns, lexical cohesion, and discourse chunks sequencing. Employment of promotional elements across article sections and moves in the two disciplines, however, differs. This study reconfirms the advantage of specificity in teaching academic literacies advocated by many applied linguists and identifies actual strategies that can be incorporated into writing curricula.