The many faces and phases of evaluation

Alba-Juez, Laura; Thompson, George G.

doi:10.1075/pbns.242.01alb

Cited by 62 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…We would furthermore like to point out that sarcastic and ironic uses of evaluative words (see section ‘Subjectivity’) are not captured here. Nevertheless, our findings are supported by recent qualitative research investigating the connection between emotion and evaluation in discourse (Mackenzie and Alba-Juez, 2019, see also Alba-Juez and Thompson, 2014). In particular, Alonso Belmonte (2019) describes how journalists use emotional-evaluative language in a major Spanish newspaper.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

“…In broad strokes (a full description is provided in section ‘Database’), subjectivity is operationalised as (i) specific evaluative words (adjectives, nouns, verbs and adverbs); (ii) stance adverbs; (iii) modal verbs; and (iv) connectives which mark argumentative discourse relations. Although our take on subjectivity and evaluation is quantitative and large-scale, these expressions occur in the context of naturalistic discourse (Alba-Juez and Thompson, 2014), where they fully develop their meaning. The study of subjectivity and evaluation in context is therefore certainly within the scope of discourse analysis.…”

Section: Complexity Meets Discourse Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More generally, we find evidence for the fact that subjectivity in language is pervasive even in supposedly objective texts (cf. Alba-Juez and Thompson, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The interplay of complexity and subjectivity in opinionated discourse

Ehret

Taboada

2020

Discourse Studies

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This paper brings together cutting-edge, quantitative corpus methodologies and discourse analysis to explore the relationship between text complexity and subjectivity as descriptive features of opinionated language. We are specifically interested in how text complexity and markers of subjectivity and argumentation interact in opinionated discourse. Our contributions include the marriage of quantitative approaches to text complexity with corpus linguistic methods for the study of subjectivity, in addition to large-scale analyses of evaluative discourse. As our corpus, we use the Simon Fraser Opinion and Comments Corpus (SOCC), which comprises approximately 10,000 opinion articles and the corresponding reader comments from the Canadian online newspaper The Globe and Mail, as well as a parallel corpus of hard news articles also sampled from The Globe and Mail. Methodologically, we combine conditional inference trees with the analysis of random forests, an ensemble learning technique, to investigate the interplay between text complexity and subjectivity. Text complexity is defined in terms of Kolmogorov complexity, that is, the complexity of a text is measured based on its description length. In this approach, texts which can be described more efficiently are considered to be linguistically less complex. Thus, Kolmogorov complexity is a measure of structural surface redundancy. Our take on subjectivity is inspired by research in evaluative language, stance and Appraisal and defined as the expression of evaluation and opinion in language. Drawing on a sentiment analysis lexicon and the literature on stance markers, a custom set of subjectivity and argumentation markers is created. The results show that complexity can be a powerful tool in the classification of text into different text types, and that stance adverbials serve as distinctive features of subjectivity in online news comments.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

Section: Complexity Meets Discourse Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

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The interplay of complexity and subjectivity in opinionated discourse

Ehret

Taboada

2020

Discourse Studies

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“…The study of subjectivity, opinion and stance has yielded a rich literature, including many corpus studies of evaluation and stance in text. The work of Susan Hunston and Geoff Thompson has provided definitions and corpus-based analyses of evaluative meaning (e.g., Hunston and Thompson 2000 ; Alba-Juez and Thompson 2014 ; Hunston 2011 ). Corpus-based studies of stance in the framework of Biber and collagues (Biber and Finegan 1989 ; Conrad and Biber 2000 ) have shown interesting insights on evaluative language.…”

Section: Appraisal Annotations On Soccmentioning

confidence: 99%

The SFU Opinion and Comments Corpus: A Corpus for the Analysis of Online News Comments

Kolhatkar

Cavasso

et al. 2019

Corpus Pragmatics

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We present the SFU Opinion and Comments Corpus (SOCC), a collection of opinion articles and the comments posted in response to the articles. The articles include all the opinion pieces published in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail in the 5-year period between 2012 and 2016, a total of 10,339 articles and 663,173 comments. SOCC is part of a project that investigates the linguistic characteristics of online comments. The corpus can be used to study a host of pragmatic phenomena. Among other aspects, researchers can explore: the connections between articles and comments; the connections of comments to each other; the types of topics discussed in comments; the nice (constructive) or mean (toxic) ways in which commenters respond to each other; how language is used to convey very specific types of evaluation; and how negation affects the interpretation of evaluative meaning in discourse. Our current focus is the study of constructiveness and evaluation in the comments. To that end, we have annotated a subset of the large corpus (1043 comments) with four layers of annotations: constructiveness, toxicity, negation and Appraisal (Martin and White, The language of evaluation, Palgrave, New York, 2005). This paper details our corpus, the data collection process, the characteristics of the corpus and describes the annotations. While our focus is comments posted in response to opinion news articles, the phenomena in this corpus are likely to be present in many commenting platforms: other news comments, comments and replies in fora such as Reddit, feedback on blogs, or YouTube comments.

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“…Halliday 1994), 'evaluation' (e.g. Hunston & Thompson 2000;Bednarek 2006;AUTHOR 2011;Thompson & Alba-Juez 2014), 'appraisal' (e.g. Martin 2000;Martin & White 2005), 'stance' and 'stance-taking' (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language patterns and attitude revisited

Hunston

2019

FOL

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This paper investigates the association between language patterns and attitudinal meanings, focusing specifically on adjective complementation patterns and types of attitudes as proposed in the Appraisal framework (Martin & White 2005). The investigation shows that the tripartite division of Attitude into Affect, Judgement and Appreciation can be supported with pattern differentials. The detailed scrutiny of adjective patterns with respect to the attitude system supports Bednarek’s (2009) argument that both aspects of attitudinal lexis (emotion or opinion lexis) and attitudinal target (the entity being evaluated) should be considered in analysing appraisal expressions, which leads to the proposal that Appraisal is in essence instantiated by choices made simultaneously in terms of the attitudinal lexis that is used and the attitudinal target that is involved.

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The many faces and phases of evaluation

Cited by 62 publications

References 28 publications

The interplay of complexity and subjectivity in opinionated discourse

The interplay of complexity and subjectivity in opinionated discourse

The SFU Opinion and Comments Corpus: A Corpus for the Analysis of Online News Comments

Language patterns and attitude revisited

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