Lesson 7Discourse motivation

The interpersonal sphere of communication• 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.

Choices and resources

• 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

Examples of corpus work

• 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,

Evaluation

• 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.

Stance

• 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

Appraisal

• Semantic Domains Subsystems Values and resources

• Attitude Affect/Judgement/ Inscribed meanings/• Appreciation Evoked meanings• Engagement Monogloss/• Heterogloss• Graduation Focus/ Force

• Summary of the Systems and subsystems of the Appraisal Model.

EvaluationLinguistic resources for persuasion

Evaluation

• ‘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

Short term evaluation and long term values

• 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 )

Expressing opinion

• 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.

Maintaining relations

• 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

Evaluation is pervasive

• 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.

Evaluation is…

“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

Evaluation as persuasion in politics The persuader uses evaluative language to convince his or her audience that theirown 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 arehonest and trustworthy (good) and maybe that others who disagree with them are not (bad).

Functions

• 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

relationships

• 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

Functions of evaluation

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)

Covert Evaluation

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 cluesGoal orientatedBased on what we recognize to be desirable

Overt Evaluation

• Lexical• Grammatical• Discourse /Textual

Evaluation

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

Evaluation

• 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 stimulus-response, 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”

(From Batstone, 1994)• the thematised it structure (it is frightening to think that…)

Grammatical and textual

• 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.

Evaluation

Discourse / Textual

John argued with SueSue argued with JohnJohn and Sue argued

The words in red are themes

Evaluation

• Discourse / TextualIn newspaper editorials the most importantevaluation is placed at the end.

Textual Evaluation 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)

Textual Evaluation 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>

Theme and Rheme

• 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)

Denotation and Connotation

obstinate, stubborn, firm, decisive, resolute, pig-headed

Same basic meaning – denotation – different connotations

Our choice of word is therefore also an evaluation

Averred or attributed

• 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.

Varying strength of evaluations

• 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

Graduation of evaluative meaning

Upscaling and downscaling of attitudinal or evaluative meaning

gradability

• 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)

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

• Force = degree of intensity• Slightly, somewhat, a bit, rather,

• Are all downtoners and lessen intensity

• Greatly, very, absolutely• Are intensifiers which increase

maximisers

• 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

lexicalisation

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

Scales of intensity

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

repetition

• 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

Persona

• 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

Interrogating a text

• 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