Evaluative Language

Anna Bączkowska, University of Gdansk, Poland
anna.baczkowska@ug.edu.pl

Thompson and Hunston state that evaluative language expresses the speaker’s personal, evaluative opinions (viewpoint or feelings) on an entity(e.g., some objects, events, behaviour, people, etc) in terms of being good or bad, by ascribing some value to the entity described. There are two more functions of evaluative language: constructing relations between the sender and the receiver and organising discourse. The former are realised, for example, by means of manipulation, hedging, and politeness. The three necessary conditions for evaluative language comprise presence of the object of description in a sentence, value-laden words (emotivity), and subjectivity. Two approaches to evaluative language can be distinguished: attitudinal (encoded by adjectives, morphological affixes, words, and phrases) and modality-oriented (grammaticalised, encoding likelihood). According to Bednarek, evaluative language comprises, inter alia, such categories of description as: comprehensibility (clear, complicated), expectedness (surprisingly, obviously), emotivity (anger, praise), importance (crucial, insignificant), im/possibility (could), necessity (must), reliability (fake, genuine), and evidentiality (proof that, he said it was). Evaluative language is also elaborated by the Appraisal Theory, which was one of the sources from which Bednarek’s evaluative language evolved. The term evaluative language is sometimes used interchangeably with the term stance, which is, however, more often applied to corpus-informed studies revolving around lexico-grammatical structures that encode evaluation. Two most common structures have been identified to signal stance: adverbials and complement clause constructions.

Keywords: appraisal theory, subjectivity, emotivity

References:
Bednarek, M. (2006). Evaluation in media discourse. Bloomsbury.
Thompson, G., & Hunston, S. (2000). Evaluation: an introduction. In S. Hunston & G. Thompson (Eds.), Evaluation in text: Authorial stance and the construction of discourse (pp. 1-27). Oxford University Press.