The negotiation of evaluation in written text

Abstract

Editors’ introduction Bolívar’s paper deals with evaluation in text. Her wider aim, like that of a number of other contributors here (Sinclair, Coulthard, Edge & Wharton, Scott, Thompson & Thompson, and Hunston), is to understand text as social interaction, but her starting point is the social functions agreed upon by speakers and writers in particular cultures and in particular contexts, from which she moves first to the text-type and thence to evaluation structures. The discussion of structures of evaluation itself leads this paper towards one of the other main themes running through this collection, namely the identification of text-important elements and how these can combine (Fries, Jordan, Berber Sardinha, Renouf, Darnton). If this contribution is thus coherent with the others in this volume, it is also related to others outside it, notably to those in Hunston & Thompson (2000). It is through textual change that evaluation shows itself. Thus, Bolívar’s model has three structural elements, the Lead, Follow, and Valuate, which at the same time structure the contribution and enable it to express an opinion, an evaluation of some situation or conditions in the world of phenomena. In Bolívar’s case the texts analysed happen to be newspaper editorials, in Spanish as well as English and ranging in date from 1711 to the present day, but it is through the LFV structure that evaluation can be seen to emerge. At the same time this structure is not merely linguistic (like the structure of the noun group with its pre- and post- modifiers, a structure which is purely organisational, not related to contextual conditions), but is one which is firmly rooted in and dependent on context, both social and inter-textual. In the case of conference abstracts, which she analyses later in her paper, the LFV structure is still present, if differently organised, since it reflects a different social purpose and context. Finally, Bolívar’s paper comes to meet that of Edge & Wharton, and Darnton, in that she is concerned to discover how the identification of a text pattern, à la Hoey, may further important pedagogical objectives.

Subjetividad, argumentación y (des)cortesía

“…La evaluación, en dicha perspectiva, afecta a la expresión de los sentimientos u opinión del hablante, a la interacción con el interlocutor y a la organización discursiva 6 . En otra dirección se encuentra el enfoque argumentativo o sociopragmático (Walton 1998, Woods-Walton 1989, Plantin 1998, Kienpointner 2008a y b, Isik-Güler/Rühi 2010) 7 o el análisis aplicado a diferentes tipos discursivos (cfr., por ejemplo, Bolívar 1997Bolívar , 2001Bolívar , 2006.…”

The “I” in interaction: authorial presense in academic writing

“…In the last three decades there has been an increasing interest in the study of interaction in written texts (Coulthard, 1977;Nystrand, 1986Nystrand, , 1989;Bakhtin, 1981;McCarthy, 1993;McCarthy and Carter, 1994;Davies, 1994;Bolivar, 1986Bolivar, , 2001; Thompson and Thetela, 1995;Hoey, 2001;Gea-Valor,2010). Drawing on earlier classifications of writer and reader interactions (Crismore, 1983(Crismore, , 1989(Crismore, , 1990Vande Kopple, 1985;Thompson and Thetela, 1995), Hyland (2005) created one of the most complete models for the study of interaction in written texts: the metadiscourse model.…”

Appraising glances: evaluating Martin's model of APPRAISAL

“…Labov 1972), in textual patterns such as Problem-Solution (Hoey 1983(Hoey , 2001, and in tri-partite models of text (e.g. Sinclair 1988;Bolivar 2001). However, until recently the concept has been only patchily explored in terms of how it is expressed and recognized.…”