Corpus-based and discourse approaches to evaluation .1 Sentiment analysis

It is clear that an important resource for expressing evaluative meaning is represented by the choice of words or phrases with particular semantic prosody. But the expression of evaluation may go beyond semantic prosody, as much work in the growing field of the study of

evaluation has shown. In a corpus-assisted study, such as the current one, it is important to find an approach which offers as comprehensive a model of evaluation as possible but lends itself to corpus analysis. As a computationally based approach to analysing evaluative language, sentiment analysis (e.g. Pang and Lee, 2008; Thelwall, Buckley and Paltoglou, 2012) might seem a useful approach to adopt in a corpus-assisted project. However, it relies on complex algorithms to highlight evaluative instances of language in texts, assigning each occurrence a value on the basis of pre-determined assessments of sentiment. It is suggested that current algorithms are not suitable for the analysis of topic specific texts (Thelwall and Buckley, 2013).

3.5.3.2 Stance and metadiscourse models

The stance or metadiscourse models (e.g. Chafe and Nichols, 1986; Biber and Finegan, 1988;

1989; Barton, 1993; Conrad and Biber, 1999; Biber, Connor and Upton, 2007; Hyland, 1999;

2004; 2005; Hyland and Tse, 2004)³², although originally developed on the basis of the qualitative analysis of individual texts, have been extensively employed using a corpus approach. They lend themselves well to corpus-based analysis because, while the complexity of systems of evaluation in language is recognised, these approaches involve the identification and analysis of sets of linguistic markers associated with evaluation. Such markers are usually referred to as evidentials (Chafe and Nichols, 1986; Barton, 1993) or stance markers (Biber

32 I include here writers who refer to the phenomenon as evidentiality.

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and Finegan, 1989; Hyland, 1999; 2005; Biber, Connor and Upton, 2007). These include modals and modal-like expressions (including hedges and boosters), sentence adverbs, sentence-initial conjunctions, and verbs, nouns, adjectives or adverbs which express attitude.

Hyland and Tse (2004) include such markers in the wider category of interactional resources.

Their model represents an elaboration on Hyland’s (Hyland, 2005; 2007) model of stance and engagement, in which the category of engagement includes the resources with which the author interacts with the reader. These resources include the use of directives, second person pronouns, self-mentions, questions, appeal to shared knowledge and personal asides.

The approach of Biber and his associates differs from the others in this group in that it recognises the importance of multi-word units in the construction of meaning. An approach based on the analysis of stance bundles has been developed (e.g. Biber, Conrad and Cortes, 2003). Stance bundles are useful indicators of how an argument is structured, since they form a bridge between sections of the text. In conversation, stance bundles typically bridge two clauses, although in academic prose, they more frequently bridge two phrases. The functional taxonomy of stance bundles is illustrated in Table 3.1 below.

Function Dimension Examples

Epistemic modality: certain personal do you know what; know what I mean Epistemic modality: certain impersonal the fact that the; it’s going to take

Epistemic modality: uncertain personal I don’t know if; I don’t know what; I don’t know how/whether/why; I don’t think so

Epistemic modality: probable/ possible personal I thought it was; I think it was Epistemic modality: probable/ possible impersonal it is possible to

Desire if you want to; do you want to; do you want me to;

I don’t want to; I would like to

Obligation we’re going to have; it’s necessary to

Intention are we going to; are you going to; I was going to;

going to have to; let’s have a look

Table 3.1 Functional taxonomy of lexical bundles (4 orthographic words), from (Biber, Conrad and Cortes, 2003: 80)

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The drawback of the stance and metadiscourse approaches, though, is that they are corpus-based rather than corpus-driven. They rely on the a-priori identification of specific lexico-grammatical features. It has been persuasively argued that there is not a straightforward one-to-one relationship between a certain lexical or grammatical feature and evaluation. Carter (1987: 78) discusses the way the meanings of a lexical item are negotiated in naturally

occurring discourse so that the collocational environment of a given word can signal a certain evaluation. In other words, semantic prosodies are central to evaluative meaning. By adopting a corpus-based approach, the researcher risks overlooking words where evaluative meaning is not immediately obvious even to a competent native speaker. Furthermore, not only is there no closed set of lexico-grammatical items which express evaluation, some instances of evaluation are realised without the use of explicitly evaluative terms An otherwise neutral term may accrue an evaluative meaning, especially if there is an accumulation of explicitly evaluative language in the context (Hunston, 2011: 3). By way of example, Hunston (ibid.) cites following passage:

As I write this, Professor Smith, now a distinguished scholar, has her job under threat from the ghastly, grey accountants who run the University of Biggin-on-Sea. We are now in an epoch of production-line universities with celebrities paid fortunes to teach eight hours a week and genuine scholars dumped in the bin.

(Ali, 2008: cited in Hunston, 2011: 3)

Hunston (2011: 3) argues that, because of the cumulative effect of phrases such as ghastly, grey accountants and production-line universities and genuine scholars dumped in the bin, we interpret celebrities paid fortunes to teach eight hours a week as a negative evaluation.

92 3.5.3.3 APPRAISAL

The APPRAISAL model, on the other hand, attempts to describe the use of APPRAISAL resources across a range of contexts. As with the stance and engagement model, Martin and White (2005) distinguish between two main types of discursive resource. Their category of attitude equates to stance. Their category of engagement is similar to Hyland’s concept, but it is conceptualised in terms of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogicality. Texts, or sections of texts, are either monoglossic, representing only one voice, or heteroglossic, that is, they entertain the possibility that other voices exist. A writer who acknowledges the existence of other voices, though, may express propositions in such a way as to close down the discursive space or may expand it. Dialogic contraction is realised through expressions such as I concur that…, the facts of the matter are that…, this is not the case, and so on. Dialogic expansion is realised through expressions such as it’s probable that …, it seems to me that …, x argues that …, and so on. The model also takes into account the resources available for intensifying or hedging the force of a proposition.

The APPRAISAL model presents a complex but comprehensive way of describing evaluation in interaction. Unlike the stance and metadiscourse models, which are based largely on academic discourse, it is based on the analysis of texts from more than one register. It is feasible that it might provide a better fit for analysing the texts in the JABS corpus. However, Hunston (2011: 54) reports that attempts at automatic evaluation recognition using

APPRAISAL have met with limited success. She attributes this to the fact that this model is designed for qualitative analyses of texts. Its shortcomings regarding the application to corpus analysis might also lie elsewhere. Martin’s (2000) early explanation of the APPRAISAL model was criticised on the grounds that it is unclear from his account how frequently the

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expressions he lists are used in naturally occurring contexts (Hyland, 2005: 175). A similar criticism might be levelled at Martin and White’s (2005) later work. Although the description is also based on examination of a large body of texts, one has to ask how often words such as scold and castigate, for example, are used in real life contexts to express dissatisfaction or phrases such as this is not the case are used to deny the truth value of a proposition. It may be that, because the work is not corpus based, several of the examples they use to illustrate their model appear unrepresentative.

3.5.3.4 Hunston’s (2000; 2011) ‘status and value’ approach

Like the stance and metadiscourse models, Hunston’s (2000) model was designed for the qualitative analysis of individual texts. It is also based on the analysis of academic texts.

However, in a later work Hunston (2011) successfully applies her analysis to texts from other genres and she demonstrates how the model can be adapted for the purposes of corpus

anlaysis. The model draws on Sinclair’s (1981) idea that sentences in texts simultaneously operate on the autonomous plane, that is, they make statements about the world, and the interactive plane, through which the writer informs the reader about the text. On the

autonomous plane, evaluation is achieved through labelling entities, while on the interactive plane, evaluation is connected to whether a statement is (following Sinclair, 1986) averred or attributed, that is, whether a writer states something as a fact or delegates responsibility for the validity of the statement. A complicating factor is that a statement can become an object of evaluation. In becoming a discursive object, a proposition is labelled and the label in itself expresses the writer’s evaluation of the status of the proposition.

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The notion of the ‘status’ noun is similar to Francis’ (1986) interpretation of the anaphoric noun. Like general nouns, such as problem and issue, anaphoric nouns, such as, fact, hypothesis and truth encapsulate the preceding stretch of discourse and signal the writer’s interpretation of its epistemic status. An anaphoric noun points forward in the argument, since it is presented as ‘the given information in terms of which the new propositional content of the clause or sentence in which it occurs is formulated (ibid.: 4). Anaphoric nouns can also signal whether or not the speaker ascribes factuality to the proposition referred to. Nouns such as fact and truth and so on, belong to the class of ‘factive’ nouns , that is nouns which encode a presupposition that what they refer to is true (ibid.: 25). Hypothesis clearly does not. The status that a writer affords a proposition tells the reader how he or she should respond to it:

whether to agree or disagree, for example. It is also connected to whether the statement is averred or attributed. The status of one statement constrains the value that can be afforded it, that is, how the reader should evaluate it and how it should subsequently be evaluated in the text. Status works on both the interactive and autonomous planes, although on the interactive plane it is equivalent, to use Halliday’s (1994) terms, to modality and on the autonomous plane to affect. The notion of value, meanwhile, equates to notions of stance (Hyland, 2005) or attitude (Martin and White, 2005).

Hunston’s (2000) model provides a powerful method for analysing evaluation in text. It was, of course, originally developed with the aim of analysing individual texts. In her exploration of the ways in which the model can be adapted for corpus analysis, Hunston (2011)

acknowledges, as Biber, Conrad and Cortes (2003) do, that multi-word units are a

fundamental means for creating meaning. She examines the ways in which modal meaning is encoded not only in modal auxiliaries or modal phrases (such as I think, kind of, sort of, and

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so on), but in less obvious expressions. The collocational environments of verbs such as decide and distinguish, for example, indicate that the phraseology in which those words occur encode modal meaning, since they are frequently preceded by words and phrases which express possibility or obligation, and so on (Hunston, 2011: 70-77). The expression to make sure, similarly encodes modal meaning. Expressions involving status nouns, such as the assumption that, the fact that, evidence that, and so on, form a bridge between one clause and the next and drive the argument forwards at the same time as expressing an evaluation of the proposition to which they refer.

The meaning encoded by such nouns in certain lexico-grammatical environments may shift, however. The noun fact, when used in the expression the fact that, may not necessarily signal factivity.Firstly, as Francis observes, fact used with an appositive that-clause has become largely delexicalised since,

the fixed phrase the fact that has taken on a general role as all-purpose

nominalisation device in cases where a noun or nominal group is required by the grammar of the preceding elements.

(Francis, 1986: 154)

Secondly, while most contexts of use of fact indicate that the status of the ‘fact’ is non-negotiable, in some contexts, for example when preceded by certain adjectives, co-ordinated with and and or, or occurring in the pattern V n as n, its status is negotiable (Hunston, 2011).

It also encodes other meanings. The environment in which the fact that occurs reveals that the phrase participates in a number of semantic sequences. Hunston (ibid.: 115-116) identifies three broad ‘motifs’ expressed by phraseologies which include the fact that: the ‘cause’ motif (i.e. ‘facts’ are the basis of an outcome or reasoning, they explain something, or cause a

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problem or solution); the ‘orientation’ motif (i.e. ‘facts’ imply something, are acknowledged or ignored); and the ‘human response’ motif (people are (un)aware of a fact, talk about a fact, react to a fact). Although the expression the fact that is often delexicalised, it nonetheless serves the function of reifying the proposition in the that-clause and carries with it the presupposition that the said object exists as a fact (Francis, 1986: 154). It implies that the speaker or writer is in possession of facts that exist in the world, and, since it implies given knowledge, it can represent an appeal to shared knowledge (ibid.).

Hunston (2011) notes that expressions involving factive status nouns are worth investigating because they shed light on the ways in which propositions become ‘facts’ and how they

‘travel’ (Morgan, 2007, cited in Hunston, 2011: 116-117). They are vehicles by means of which propositions advanced in one domain travel to another (Hunston, 2011: 118). Fact is the most frequent of the several status nouns which appear as keywords in the JABS corpus, so that part of the analysis focuses on the fact that and other similar expressions. By

acknowledging the role of status nouns in the expression of evaluation, Hunston’s (2000;

2011) model is suited to the needs of the current project, which is interested in how propositions which originate in the domain of academia are rearticulated as they travel.

Hunston’s model is suited to the Sinclairean approach to corpus linguistics in that it accounts for the primacy of phraseology, the role of semantic prosody in contributing to meaning, and the interdependence of lexis and grammar.

97 3.5.4 Summary of Section 3.5

• The lexico-grammatical patterns in which a lexical item typically occurs colour the meaning of that item, contributing to both semantic and pragmatic meaning – we can refer to this phenomenon as semantic prosody;

• Multi-word items may encode evaluative meaning and often act as a cohesive link between clauses;

• The examination of status nouns is a guide to the ways in which epistemological propositions are expressed;

• Particular phraseological expressions, for example, the fact that, may participate in a variety of semantic sequences, each of which expresses a different form of evaluative meaning.