The language of

evaluation - Appraisal

Estudos do Discurso
Letras Inglês (UFAL)
1.1. Appraisal is concerned with…
how writers/speakers approve and disapprove, enthuse and
abhor, applaud and criticise, and with how they position their
readers/listeners to do likewise;
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;
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.
1.2 Appraisal in a functional model
of language
1.2.1 Metafunction

Appraisal focuses on interpersonal meaning in written

discourse.

Interpersonal resources are concerned with negotiating social

relations: how people are interacting, including the feelings
they try to share.
1.2.2 Realisation
Realisation consists on the idea that language is a stratified
semiotic system involving three cycles of coding at different
levels of abstraction:
1.2.2 Realisation
phonology - deals with organisation of phonemes into
syllables, and their deployment in units of rhythm and
intonation;
graphology - deals with the organization of letters into
sentences (via intermediate units), alongside punctuation,
layout and formatting;
lexicogrammar - concerned with the recoding of phonological
and graphological patterns as words and structures.
Lexicogrammar is not made up of phonological or
graphological patterns; rather it is realised through them.
1.2.2 Realisation
discourse semantics - to emphasise the fact that it is
concerned with meaning beyond the clause (with texts in
other words). This level is concerned with various aspects
of discourse organisation, including the question of how
people, places and things are introduced in text and kept
track of once there (identification); how events and states
of affairs are linked to one another in terms of time, cause,
contrast and similarity (conjunction); how participants are
related as part to whole and sub-class to class (ideation);
how turns are organised into exchanges of goods, services
and information (negotiation); and how evaluation is
established, amplified, targeted and sourced (appraisal).
3 axes
The appraisal system attends to three axes along which the
speaker’s/writer’s intersubjective stance may vary:
attitude - the means by which writers/speakers positively or
negatively evaluate the entities, happenings and states-of-affairs
with which their texts are concerned.
modality/engagement - how the textual voice positions itself with
respect to other voices and other positions.
intensification/graduation - how speakers/writers increase and
decrease the force of their assertions and how they sharpen or blur
the semantic categorisations with which they operate.
Attitude
affect - how people express their feelings and
emotions in discourse.
Affect as quality: participants are described or
given an attribute; as process: mainly through
mental and behavioral processes describing
mental and/or physiological expressions of
emotion; as comment: in the form of a modal
adjunct expressing an evaluation.
Attitude

judgement - concerns ‘ethics and

institutionalized feelings or sensations in
relation to human behavior”. Target: a
person.
Attitude

Social sanction: how truthful of ethical

someone is;
Social esteem: evaluations in relation to
normality (how normal someone is), capacity
(how capable someone is) and tenacity (how
persistent someone is)
Attitude

appreciation - concerns the attribution of

values to a target thing.
Engagement
How the producer of a text positions
itself in relation to other textual voices.

Disclaim - the textual voice positions

itself as at odds with, or rejecting, some
contrary position (e.g. using negative)
Engagement
Proclaim: by representing the proposition as
highly warrantable (compelling, valid,
plausible, well-founded, generally agreed,
reliable, etc.), the textual voice sets itself
against, suppresses or rules out alternative
positions (e.g. naturally …, of course …,
obviously …, admittedly …the truth of the
matter is …, there can be no doubt that…, X
affirms that…)
Engagement
Entertain: by explicitly presenting the proposition
as grounded in its own contingent, individual
subjectivity, the authorial voice represents the
proposition as but one of a range of possible
positions – it thereby entertains or invokes these
dialogic alternatives (e.g. it seems, the evidence
suggests, apparently, I hear, perhaps, probably, maybe,
it’s possible, in my view, I suspect that, I believe that,
probably, it’s almost certain that …, may/will/must)
Graduation
Concerns the lexical choices made to intensify or
soften feelings and emotions in discourse.
One may intensify an emotion by using these
lexical items, such as “better, best, very, really,
much”, among others.
One may soften an emotion by using lexical items
such as “a little, a bit, um pouco, nem tanto”, among
others
Referências