Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse

This is an accessible and wide-ranging account of current research in one of the most central aspects of discourse analsysis: evalution in and of written and spoken language. Evalution is the broad cover term for the expression of a speakers - or writers - attitudes, feelings, and values. It covers areas sometimes referred to as stance, modality, affect or appraisal. Evaluation (a) expresses the speakers opinion and thus reflects the value-system of that person and their community; (b) constructs relations between speaker and hearer (or writer and reader); (c) plays a key role in how discourse is organized. Every act of evalution expresses and contributes to a communal value-system, which in turn is a component of the ideology that lies behind every written or spoken text. Conceptually, evaluation is comparative, subjective, and value-laden. In linguistic terms it may be analysed lexically, grammatically, and textually. These themes and perspectives are richly exemplified in the chapters of this book, by authors aware and observant of the fact that processes of linguistic analysis are themselves inherently evaluative. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture. The editors open the book by introducing the field and provide separate, contextual introductions to each chapter. They have also collated the references into one list, itself a valuable research guide. The exemplary perspectives and analyses presented by the authors will be of central interest to everyone concerned with the analysis of discourse, whether as students of language, literature, or communication. They also have much to offer students of politics and culture.

Table of Contents:
1: Geoff Thompson and Susan Hunston: Evaluation 2: Michael Hoey: Persuasive Rhetoric in Linguistics 3: Joanna Channell: Corpus-based Analysis of Evaluative Lexis 4: Susan Conrad and Douglas Biber: Adverbial Marking of Stance in Speech and Writing 5: Susan Hunston and John Sinclair: A Local Grammar of Evaluation 6: Martin Cortazzi and Lixian Jin: Evaluating Evaluation in Narrative 7: Geoff Thompson and Jianglin Zhou: Evaluation and Organization in Text 8: J. R. Martin: Beyond Exchange 9: Susan Hunston: Evaluation and the Planes of Discourse References

About the Author :
Susan Hunston is a senior lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham and author of numerous articles on Evaluation and on Corpus Grammar. She has taught EFL/ESL in the Philippines and in Britain, and has taught Applied Linguistics at the National University of Singapore (1983-90). She has also worked as a grammarian at Cobuild (1993-5). Geoff Thompson is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature, University of Liverpool. He has previously taught English as a Foreign Language, Language Teaching Methodology, and Applied Linguistics at schools and universities in Germany, Algeria, Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, and China.

Review :
... the volume has an overall coherence as well as an accessible structure ... a valuable resource. Discourse Studies ... a necessary addition to any research library in which functional linguistics, genre studies, corpus linguistics and narratology already take up a greater proportion of the shelf space. Discourse Studies