Drawing on Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory, we study the language of evaluation in a corpus of interviews selected from the archives of The Magdalene Oral History Project. Apart from being deprived of proper food, clothing, and their identity, many of the women who spent their lives in Ireland’s Magdalene institutions had been, or were, sexually assaulted, and physically and psychologically abused. Their criminalization led them to long-lasting incarceration for no apparent reason and, years further on, prevented them from developing any active social voice. Thus, the discursive patterns in these texts can be seen as the symptom of ‘the discourse of female victimhood’, which is mainly characterized by their difficulty to express their emotions and their opinions, and their tendency to avoid mentioning what happened to them and who the agent was. The Magdalene survivors felt both hatred and remorse, and seemed to be able to speak about their painful experience only by silencing others’ liability, while making self-reproach and sympathy go hand in hand in their construal of both their past and themselves.

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Numerous studies to date have investigated the cohesive, evaluative and formal features of semantically unspecific abstract nouns such asobjectiveorassumption.These nouns share the property of ‘shell-nounhood’, associated with their ability to package and characterise complex discourse segments. One broad genre where this ability is widely exploited is academic discourse, which favours a markedly nominal cohesive style. Despite the extensive use of academic corpora in the study of shell-nounhood, the research focus has been primarily on specific sub-genres, formal patterns and rhetorical functions. This paper critically reviews the available evidence on this genre, using the corpora from which such evidence was obtained as its basic organising principle. In so doing, it uncovers some of the gaps to be addressed by future research, thereby setting the stage for more comprehensive descriptions that may usher in new pedagogies for the teaching of this crucial aspect of lexical cohesion in academic discourse.