Corpus Approaches to Evaluation: Phraseology and Evaluative Language

Corpus Approaches to Evaluation: Phraseology and Evaluative Language

Publisher Comments:

This book applies a set of corpus investigation techniques to the study of evaluation, or stance, or affect, in naturally-occurring discourse. Evaluative language indicates opinions, attitudes, and judgments. It is an important part of activities such as persuading someone that a particular viewpoint is correct, or in constructing knowledge from a different number of theories. This book argues that phraseology--regularities or patterns in language identifiable from corpus studies--is important to the study of evaluative language. It makes a number of more specific arguments: that modal meaning is expressed through particular phrases and not only through modal verbs; that figurative phrases are used to intensify evaluation; and that patterns of use may be exploited to achieve an automatic identification of evaluations. It also builds on the author's previous work in exploring how films and journalism use language and images to build knowledge from ideas.

Synopsis:

This book applies a set of corpus investigation techniques to the study of evaluation, or stance, or affect, in naturally-occurring discourse. It reviews previous work in this area and discusses the limitations and the opportunities offered by the approach in question. It also extends current work in a number of new directions: it extends the notion of 'propositional status' into the area of images as well as of texts; it proposes a set of 'modal-like entities' that cover some of the same semantic areas as modal verbs but which are difficult to observe without corpus evidence; it highlights the role of phraseology in the identification of evaluation; and it proposes a notion of 'semantic sequence', being that which is often said in specific discourses, and which, it is argued, is identifiable through corpus techniques.