As we can see from Figure 1.17 and Table 1.4, appraisal is one of three major discourse semantic resources construing interpersonal meaning 34 The Language of Evaluation
power
solidarity
negotiation involvement
appraisal
Figure 1.17 Interpersonal semantic systems and tenor variables
(alongside involvement and negotiation). Appraisal itself is regionalised as three interacting domains – ‘attitude’, ‘engagement’ and ‘graduation’.
Attitudeis concerned with our feelings, including emotional reactions, judgements of behaviour and evaluation of things. Engagementdeals with sourcing attitudes and the play of voices around opinions in dis- course.Graduationattends to grading phenomena whereby feelings are amplified and categories blurred.
Attitudeis itself divided into three regions of feeling, ‘affect’, ‘judge- ment’ and ‘appreciation’. Affect deals with resources for construing emotional reactions, for example feeling of shock in relation to the events of 9/11:
The terrible events of the past week have left us with feelings – in order of occurrence – of horror, worry, anger, and now, just a general gloom. (Mourning 2001)
Judgement is concerned with resources for assessing behaviour according to various normative principles, for example criticism of Table 1.4 Interpersonal semantics in relation to lexicogrammar and phonology Register Discourse semantics Lexicogrammar Phonology
Negotiation
Tenor – speech function – mood – tone (& ‘key’)
– exchange – tagging
Appraisal
power – engagement – ‘evaluative’ lexis – loudness
(status) – affect – modal verbs – pitch movement
– judgement – modal adjuncts – voice quality – appreciation – polarity – phonaesthesia – graduation – pre/numeration – [formatting]
– intensification – repetition – manner; extent
solidarity – logico-semantics
(contact) – vocation
Involvement
– naming – proper names – ‘accent’ …
– technicality – technical lexis – whisper … – abstraction – specialised lexis – actronyms
– anti-language – slang – ‘pig latins’
– swearing – taboo lexis – secret scripts – grammatical
metaphor
the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard’s neo-conservative government:
Worse, this is a meanadministration, a miserly, mingy, minatory bunch if ever there was one. [Carlton 2000: 38]
Appreciation looks at resources for construing the value of things, including natural phenomena and semiosis (as either product or process), for examples a fan’s rave review of a Stevie Ray Vaughn CD:
… and, as a bonus, a very psychedelic, destructive (literally!), catharticandliberatoryversion of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Third stone from the sun’. [Amazon.com online reviews]
As can be seen our approach to feelings is a fairly encompassing one, moving well beyond linguistic construal of emotion into domains where attitude is deployed to control behaviour and manage taste. Our framework for analysing attitude is presented in Chapter 2 below.
Broadly speaking engagementis concerned with the ways in which resources such as projection, modality, polarity, concession and various comment adverbials position the speaker/writer with respect to the value position being advanced and with respect to potential responses to that value position – by quoting or reporting, acknowledging a possi- bility, denying, countering, affirming and so on. In the following exam- ple, the writer begins by affirming baldly that what he says is true (not making this up), uses a long chain of projection and quotation marks to carefully attribute the charge of terrorism (a passenger saidhe hearda man callhimself a ‘Bosnian terrorist’), and then counters the expectations he’s set up by letting us in parenthetically on what in fact was said:
Meanwhile (and we’re not making this up), two Indian nationals on a flight from Singapore to Hong Kong were detained at Changi Airport after an American passenger said he heard one of the men calling himself a ‘Bosnian terrorist.’ (The man in fact said he was a
‘bass guitarist.’) [Mourning 2001]
In Chapter 3 we develop a social dialogic perspective on these resources which looks at whether or not and how speakers acknowledge alternative 36 The Language of Evaluation
positions to their own – monoglossic or heteroglossic discourse (after Bakhtin, eg 1981).
Graduation is concerned with gradability. For attitude, since the resources are inherently gradable, graduation has to do with adjusting the degree of an evaluation – how strong or weak the feeling is.
This kind of graduationis called ‘force’; realisations include intensifica- tion, comparative and superlative morphology, repetition, and various graphological and phonological features (alongside the use of intensi- fied lexis – loatheforreally dislike, and so on). In general there seem to be more resources for turning the volume up than for turning it down:
raise so touchy, infinitely more naked, quite clinical, most dangerous
lower a little upset, somewhat upset, the least bit more information In the context of non-gradable resources graduation has the effect of adjusting the strength of boundaries between categories,10constructing core and peripheral types of things; this system is called ‘focus’ and is exemplified below:
sharpen a fully-fledged, award-winning, gold-plated monster;
all alone
soften a word … spelled somewhat like terrorists; about 60 years old
Note the complementarity of force and focus in the following responses to a Nigerian scamster by one of his exasperated ‘victims’
[Column 8 2002 – Sydney Morning Herald]:
force singularly, extraordinarily, incredibly, bewilderingly stupid .…
focus Some pure essence of stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of stupidity that we know.
Graduationsystems are further developed in Chapter 3. An overview of these appraisal systems is presented as Figure 1.18. For synoptic intro- ductions to the system see Martin 2000a, Martin & Rose 2003; the appraisal website and discussion group provide internet access to these tools: www/grammatics.com/appraisal/; Macken-Horarik & Martin 2003 includes a number of recent papers drawing on this model.
1.5 Appraisal and other traditions of evaluative