The Language of Evaluation
Introduction
This book is concerned with the interpersonal in language, with the subjective presence of
writers/speakers in texts as they adopt stances towards both the material they present and those with whom they communicate. It is concerned with how writers/speakers approve and disapprove, enthuse and abhor, applaud and criticize, and with how they position their readers/listeners to do likewise. It is concerned with the construction by texts of communities of shared feelings and values, and with the linguistic mechanisms for the sharing of emotions, tastes and normative assessments. It is concerned with how writers/speakers construe for themselves particular authorial identities or personae, with how they align or disalign themselves with actual or potential respondents, and with how they construct for their texts an intended or ideal audience. While such issues have been seen as beyond the purview of linguistic enquiry by some influential branches of twentieth-century linguistics, they have, of course, been of longstanding interest for functionally and semiotically oriented approaches and for those whose concern is with discourse, rhetoric and communicative effect. We offer here a new approach to these issues, developed over the last decade or so by researchers working within the Systemic Functional Ling
uistic (hereafter SFL) paradigm of M.A.K. Halliday and his colleagues. (See, for example, Halliday 2004/1994, Martin 1992b or Matthiessen 1995.) SFL identifies three modes of meaning which operate simultaneously in all utterances – the textual, the ideational and the interpersonal. Our purpose in the book is to develop and extend the SFL account of the interpersonal by attending to three axes along which the speaker’s/writer’s int er-subjective stance may vary. (1.1,P14)
History and development
Our model of evaluation evolved within the general theoretical framework of SFL. Eggins
2004/1994 provides an accessible introduction to the ‘Sydney’ register of SFL which informed our work. For grammar, we relied on Halliday 2004/1994 and Matthiessen 1995 and for discourse analyses we used Martin 1992b (later recontextualised as Martin&Rose 2003). The most relevant reservoir of theoretical concepts is Halliday & Matthiessen 1999 (for thumbnail sketches of SFL theory see the introductory chapters in Halliday&Martin1993and Christie & Martin 1997). We’ll now outline some of the basic parameters of SFL, by way of situating appraisal within a holistic model of language and social context. At heart SFL is a multi-perspectival model, designed to provide analysts with complementary lenses for interpreting language in use. One of the most basic of these complementarities is the notion of
kinds of meaning –the idea that language is a resource for mapping ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning onto one another in virtually every act of communication. Ideational resources are concerned with construing experience. Interpersonal resources are concerned with negotiating social relations. Textual resources are concerned with information flow. In this book we are focusing on interpersonal meaning. Martin&Rose2003 provide a sympathetic framework for dealing with interpersonal meaning in relation to meaning of other kinds. In addition, for ease of exposition, we are concentrating here on interpersonal meaning in written discourse. In this respect our presentation complements Eggins&Slade 1997, which deals with spoken language. Their participation in the development of appraisal analysis confirms our expectation that the tools developed here can be usefully applied to both spoken and written texts. (1.2,P20)
Up to about 1990, work on interpersonal meaning in SFL was more strongly oriented to interaction than feeling. This was the result of Halliday’s seminal w ork on the grammar of mood and modality (Halliday1994)and its extension into the analysis of turn-taking in dialogue(speech function and exchange structure as introduced in Halliday 1984, Martin 1992b, Eggins & Slade 1997). Working with colleagues in the early 1990s we began to develop a more lexically-based perspective, triggered in the first instance by the need for a richer understanding of interpersonal meaning in monologic texts. Initial
ly we were concerned with affect in narrative, and moved on to consider evaluation in literary criticism, the print media, art criticism, administrative discourse and history discourse as part of an action research project concerned with literacy in the workplace and secondary school (Iedema, Feez & White 1994, Iedema 1995, Martin 2000a, Martin 2001b).(1.2,P21) Our own position, as outlined above, takes attitude as in some sense focal and distinguishes engagement and graduation as distinct resource. We developed our approach within the general theoretical framework of SFL, in the context of its rich descriptions of phonology/graphology and signing, lexico-grammar, discourse semantics, register and genre and multimodality.(1.5,P52-53)
The purpose of the book
We attend to what has traditionally been dealt with under the he ading of ‘affect’ – the means by which writers/speakers positively or negatively evaluate the entities, happenings and states-of-affairs with which their texts are concerned. Our approach takes us beyond many traditional accounts of ‘affect’ in that it addresses not only the means by which speakers/writers overtly encode what they present as their own attitudes but also those means by which they more indirectly activate evaluative stances and
position readers/listeners to supply their own assessments. These attitudinal evaluations are of interest
not only because they reveal the speaker’s/writer’s feelings and values but also because their expression can be related to the speaker’s/writer’s status or authority as construed by the text, and because they operate rhetorically to construct relations of alignment and rapport between the writer/speaker and actual or potential respondents.
Our concern is also with what has traditionally been dealt with under the heading of ‘modality’ and particularly under the he adings of ‘epistemic modality’ and ‘evidentiality’. We extend traditional accounts by attending not only to issues of speaker/writer certainty, commitment and knowledge but also to questions of how the textual voice positions itself with respect to other voices and other positions. In our account, these meanings are seen to provide speakers and writers with the means to present themselves as recognising, answering, ignoring, challenging, rejecting, fending off, anticipating or accommodating actual or potential interlocutors and the value positions they represent.
We also attend to what has been dealt with under headings such as ‘intensification’ and ‘vague language’, providing a framework for describing how speakers/writers increase and decrease the force o f their assertions and how they sharpen or blur the semantic categorisations with which they
operate.(1.1,P15)
Three subsystems of appraisal
On the basis of the complementarities introduced above we can locate appraisal as an interpersonal system at the level of discourse semantics. At this level it co-articulates interpersonal meaning with two other systems–negotiation and involvement. Negotiation complements appraisal by focusing on the interactive aspects of discourse, speech function and exchange structure (as presented in Martin 1992b). Involvement complements appraisal by focusing on non-gradable resources for negotiating tenor relations, especially solidarity.
Appraisal itself is regionalised as three interacting domains –‘attitude’, ‘engagement’ an d
‘graduation’. Attitude is concerned with our feelings, including emotional reactions, judgements of behaviour and evaluation of things. Engagement deals with sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in discourse. Graduation attends to grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred. (1.4,p48)
Attitude is itself divided into three regions of feeling, ‘affect’, ‘judgement’ and ‘appreciation’. Affect deals with resources for construing emotional reactions. Judgement is concerned with resources
for assessing behaviour according to various normative principles, Appreciation looks at resources for construing the value of things, including natural phenomena and semiosis (as either product or process).
(1.4,p48-49)
This system involves three semantic regions covering what is traditionally referred to as emotion, ethics and aesthetics. Emotion is arguably at the heart of these regions. Affect is concerned with registering positive and negative feelings. Judgement deals with attitudes towards behaviour, which we admire or criticise, praise or condemn. In general terms judgements can be divided into those dealing with ‘social esteem’ and those oriented to ‘social sanction’. Judgements of esteem have to do with
‘normality’ (how unusual someone is), ‘capacity’ (how capable they are) and ‘tenacity’ (h ow resolute they are); judgements of sanction have to do with ‘veracity’ (how truthful someone is) and ‘propriety’ (how ethical someone is). Social esteem tends to be policed in the oral culture, through chat, gossip, jokes and stories of various kinds – with humor often having a critical role to play (Eggins & Slade 1997). Social sanction on the other hand is more often codified in writing, as edicts, decrees, rules, regulations and laws about how to behave as surveilled by church and state – with penalties and punis
hments as levers against those not complying with the code.(2.3,P65) Appreciation involves evaluations of semiotic and natural phenomena, according to the ways in which they are valued or not in a given field. In general terms appreciations can be divided into our ‘reactions’ to things (do they catch our attention; do they please us?), their ‘composition’ (balance and complexity), and their ‘value’ (how innovative, authentic, timely, etc.).(2.4,P69) Grammatically, as Suzanne Eggins has suggested to us, we might think of reaction, composition and valuation in relation to mental processes –the way we look at things (our gaze). Reaction is related to affection (emotive –‘it grabs me’, desiderative –‘I want it’); composition is related to perception (our view of order); and valuation is related to cognition (our considered opinions). Alternatively, the appreciation framework might be interpreted metafunctionally –with reaction oriented to inter- personal significance, composition to textual organisation and valuation to ideational worth.(2.4,P70) The source of affect is of course conscious participants, including persons, human collectives and institutions (Halliday &Matthiessen 1999). The behaviour of these conscious participants is the target of judgement. Appreciation on the other hand targets things, whether concrete or abstract, material or semiotic.(2.4,P72)
Broadly speaking engagement is concerned with the ways in which resources such as projection, modality, polarity, concession and various comment adverbials position the speaker/writer with respect
to the value position being advanced and with respect to potential responses to that value position – by quoting or reporting, acknowledging a possibility, denying, countering, affirming and so on.(1.4，p49) In broad terms, then, we can categorise utterances accordingly to this two-way distinction, classifying them as ‘monoglossic’ when they make no reference to other voices and viewpoints and as ‘heteroglossic’when they do invoke or allow for dialogistic alternatives.(3.3,P112) We observe that these heteroglossic resources can be divided into two broad categories according to whether they are ‘dialogically expansive’ or ‘dialogically contractive’ in their intersubjective functionality. The distinction turns on the degree to which an utterance, by dint of one or more of these locutions, actively makes allowances for dialogically alternative positions and voices (dialogic expansion), or alternatively, acts to challenge, fend off or restrict the scope of such (dialogic contraction).(3.5,P115) Dialogically contract – they close down the space for dialogic alternatives, dialogically expanse--- as opening up the dialogic space for alternative positions.(3.5,P116) ‘E ntertain’– those wordings by which the authorial voice indicates that its position is but one of a number of possible positions and thereby, to greater or lesser degrees, makes dialogic space for those possibilities. (3.6, P117)Under the heading of ‘attribution’, we deal with those formulations which disassociate the proposition from the text’s internal authorial voice by attributing it so some external source.(3.7,P124) Contraction contractive meanings fall into two broad categories. The first of these we term ‘disclaim’– meanings by which some dialogic alternative is
directly rejected or supplanted, or is represented as not applying. The second of these we term ‘proclaim’– meanings by which, interpolation, emphasis or intervention, dialogic alternatives are confronted, challenged, overwhelmed or otherwise excluded.(3.8,P131)
Graduation inc ludes two subsystems , force and focus. Graduation has to do with adjusting the degree of an evaluation – how strong or weak the feeling is. This kind of graduation is called ‘force’. Graduation has the effect of adjusting the strength of boundaries between categories, constructing core and peripheral types of things; this system is called‘focus.(1.4,P50) The assessment of degree of intensity of qualities and processes is termed ‘intensification’. Intensifications divide into two broad lexico-grammatical classes –‘isolating’ and ‘infusing’. The distinction turns on whether the
resources翻译
up-scaling/down-scaling is realized by an isolated, individual item which solely, or at least primarily, performs the function of setting the level of intensity, or whether the sense of up/down-scaling is fused with a meaning which serves some other semantic. (3.19,P154)Localised or relative scaling with respect to intensity is realized via comparatives and superlatives. (3.19,P155,P157)Figurative meanings

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