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Evaluative Key: Taking a Stance
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texts will vary in which of the meaning-making possibilities they take up.
This variability is conditioned by key aspects of the social context in which the text operates, namely the social roles and relationships of those involved in the communication, the nature of the text as a com- municative process and the domain of human activity or experience it references or enacts. Particular settings for these aspects of social context condition which linguistic options are likely to be taken up by the text.
Configurations of these aspects of social context tend to reoccur and accordingly so do the configurations of linguistic options taken up by texts as they reflect a particular social setting. Thus the stylistic similarities which have been observed, for example, in the language doctors use with their patients can be related to consistencies in the power relations which operate in such consultations, the subject matter of illness/medical treatment, and the spoken, spontaneous, face-to-face nature of the communication. Such contextually conditioned configu- rations of linguistic options are termed ‘registers’. A register, therefore, can be thought of as a meaning-making sub-potential – a particular setting of the meaning-making options available to the speaker by which they will be more likely to take up certain options and less likely to take up others, to the point that some options will occur repeatedly while others will be significantly constrained in their use or will not be taken up at all.
The SFL approach, then, leads us to look at linguistic phenomena variably from the perspective of language as meaning making potential and from the perspective of the instantiation of that potential in indi- vidual texts. It leads us to identify what Halliday and Matthiessen (1999) have termed a ‘cline of instantiation’. At one end of this cline is language viewed as a generalised system of meaning-making potential and at the other extreme is language viewed as the instantiation of that meaning- making potential in individual texts. Between these two extremes are vantage points by which we observe situation-based settings for that generalised potential (sub-potentials) which can be observed across texts of the same text-type or register. Thus, as shown in Table 4.1, we can locate our analytical perspective at any of a number of points along the system/instance cline.
Notice that, following Martin & Rose 2003, we do not see textual instances as the end point of instantiation. While texts are often highly constraining in terms of the meanings which are to be taken up, it is, nevertheless, only through the act of reader/listener interpreta- tion in a given context that meaning actually occurs. And this final
‘reading’ may, of course, vary between readers/listeners according to 162 The Language of Evaluation
the assumptions, knowledge and value systems they bring to the text and the use they are making of the text. (See Chapter 2, section 2.6 for a fuller account of different orientations to ‘reading’.) Thus a text can be seen as providing for a set of possible meanings (though some will be significantly more favoured and hence more probable than others), with particular possibilities only instantiated by a given reading. For one text there can be a range of instantiations and hence interpretations.
The styles of evaluative language which are our concern in this chapter can be understood by reference to this framework, with the appraisal resources we have outlined up to this point operating at the level of gen- eralised systemic potential and the evaluative styles with which we are currently concerned operating at the level of register and of text-type.
We outline the cline of potential/instantiation as it applies for evaluation in Table 4.2.
You will notice that we propose two analytical vantage points in the instantiation cline falling between the extremes of system and instance/
reading, namely those of ‘key’ and ‘stance’. Through this we identify two ways of looking at the communicative/rhetorical effect we have, to this point, been terming evaluative style. The notion of ‘style’ always involves degrees of generalisation. In some cases, that generalisation may be across the utterances which constitute a relatively large number of texts, whose voice recurs very generally in institutional settings. We refer to this kind of generalisation of evaluative options as ‘key’. Within key, we are also interested in more delicate distinctions among voices Table 4.1 Cline of instantiation – from system to reading
1. system (the global meaning making potential provided by the language) 2. register (contextual variants or sub-selections of the global meaning- making potential – involving more fully institutionalised reconfigurations of the probabilities for the occurrence of particular meaning-making options or for the co-occurrence of options)
3. text type (groups of texts with comparable configurations of the probabilities of occurrence of options – involving less fully institutionalised configurations of the probabilities)
4. instance (individual texts – the actualisation of the global meaning making potential, typically in conformity with the sub-potential settings of a given register)
5. reading (the uptake of meanings in a text according to the listener/
reader’s subjectively determined reading position.)
based on generalisations about relatively smaller numbers of text. We refer to these sub-keys as ‘stance’.
4.2 Evaluative key in journalistic discourse –