This book applies a set of corpus investigation techniques to the study of evaluation, or stance, or affect, in naturally-occurring discourse. Evaluative language indicates opinions, attitudes, and judgments. It is an important part of activities such as persuading someone that a particular viewpoint is correct, or in constructing knowledge from a different number of theories. This book argues that phraseology--regularities or patterns in language identifiable from corpus studies--is important to the study of evaluative language. It makes a number of more specific arguments: that modal meaning is expressed through particular phrases and not only through modal verbs; that figurative phrases are used to intensify evaluation; and that patterns of use may be exploited to achieve an automatic identification of evaluations. It also builds on the author's previous work in exploring how films and journalism use language and images to build knowledge from ideas.

About the Author
Susan Hunston is Professor of English Language at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Corpora in Applied Linguistics (2002), co-author with Gill Francis of Pattern Grammar: a corpus-driven approach to the lexical grammar of English (1999), and co-editor with Geoff Thompson, of Evaluation in Text: authorial stance and the construction of discourse (2000) and System and Corpus: exploring connections (2006).

Reviews

"Hunston shows how a suitable corpus linguistics methodology can be applied to validate theories of discourse analysis." - Nick Moore, Khalifa Universtiy of Science Technology and Research, United Arab Emirates

'... this book is an excellent presentation of Hunston's dedicated interest in evaluative texts and her continuing work on the interface of corpus linguistics and academic evaluation in the past decade. It will provde guidance for newcomers to this field, and also will be attractive to researchers already in the field because the studies presented in this book will provide them with useful suggestions for possible applications and further research. In sum, in this book readers may find that the combination of the three concepts will give them insight into how evaluative language works and new investigation directions.The book will be attractive to a large body of readers.' - Discourse Studies

Book Information
ISBN 9780415836517
Author Susan Hunston
Format Paperback
Page Count 212
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 390g