Exploring evaluative, emotive and persuasive strategies in discourse

Evaluation, emotion and persuasion, as well as their interplay, are examined through the prism of theoretical frameworks with a vast and well-established research tradition, such as the Appraisal Framework, Functional Linguistics, or Critical Discourse Analysis. Furthermore, the analyses cover three key linguistic levels: morphology, syntax and discourse as a whole, which are analyzed empirically in data samples gathered from real and diverse socio-cultural settings.

Acknowledgements

The present study was financially supported by a grant (ID No: FFI2013-47792-C2-2-P). This chapter is part of the long-term research Project ‘EMOtion and language at work’: The discursive emotive/evaluative FUNction in different texts and contexts within corporate and institutional work: PROject PERsuasion (EMOFUN-DETT: PROPER).

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PART 1

A CROSS-LINGUISTIC APPROACH

1

Comparing Engagement in Non-fictional Texts: An English-Spanish Contrastive Study of Argumentative and Expository Texts from a Parallel Corpus

MARTA CARRETERO

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Abstract

Following the Appraisal framework, this paper explores the role of Engagement in 20 argumentative and 20 expository texts from MULTINOT, an English-Spanish parallel corpus. The realisations of the different subcategories of Engagement were submitted to quantitative analysis, and the main results are as follows: firstly, the distribution of Engagement devices in the English and Spanish texts displays more differences than expected, which hints that these devices were not always faithfully translated; secondly, the comparison of the original texts in both languages shows distributional differences in the more delicate categories of Engagement but not in its main categories; and thirdly, distributional dissimilarities were also found between the argumentative and expository texts, largely due to the informative purpose of the latter and the persuasive purpose of the former. These results together provide evidence of the close relationship between persuasion and evaluation in language.

Keywords: Appraisal, Engagement, argumentative texts, expository texts, English-Spanish contrastive analysis, UAM Corpus Tool.

1 Introduction

Following the Appraisal system of analysis of evaluative language, developed within Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Martin and White 2005; White 2002, 2015), this paper addresses the linguistic expression of Engagement, one of the three major subcategories of Appraisal, which concerns the relation between what is being communicated by a speaker or writer and other actual or potential viewpoints. The texts selected for analysis are English and Spanish non-fictional texts of two types, namely argumentative and expository, extracted from the MULTINOT corpus, a comparable and parallel corpus (described in Section 4).1 Both kinds of texts deal with facts and information, but differ in that argumentative texts intend to persuade the reader of the validity of a given position on a certain issue. The research aims to gain further insight into how the distribution of different kinds of Engagement expressions is influenced by the language and the main purpose of the texts.

The paper is structured as follows: Section 2, which describes the theoretical framework, contains a brief description of the Appraisal system and a more detailed description of the system of Engagement. Section 3 states the research hypotheses. Section 4 describes the MULTINOT corpus and the method used for analysing the data. Section 5 discusses a number of unclear cases, some of which might be analysed as belonging to two different categories of Engagement, while others display an overlap of Engagement with Attitude or Graduation; the decisions taken regarding the analysis in these cases are made explicit. Section 6 specifies and discusses the results of the quantitative analysis. Section 7 contains a final discussion and concluding remarks.

2 Theoretical Framework

2.1. THE APPRAISAL SYSTEM

Appraisal is a well-known system aimed at analysing the language of evaluation, that is, the linguistic expressions that indicate “the subjective presence of writers/speakers in texts as they adopt stances towards both the material they present and those with whom they communicate” (Martin and White 2005:1). This system was developed within the systemic-functional approach to linguistics and had its origins in work carried out in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s for the Write It Right Project, conceived as an aid for students in schools for the disadvantaged. Studies on Appraisal have been dramatically expanded to the analysis of different languages and registers.2

Within the Appraisal system, the main categories are Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. Attitude concerns the expression of emotional, moral and aesthetic opinions, as in (1):

(1)The debtors’ prisons of the nineteenth century were a failure – inhumane and not exactly helping to ensure repayment. (EO_ ESS_001)3

Graduation concerns the expression of gradability, i.e. the strengthening or weakening of the opinions expressed. Expressions of Graduation, unlike expressions of Attitude, do not have intrinsic positive or negative values but acquire them in context. Graduation is divided into two subtypes: Focus and Force. Focus involves prototypicality, in the sense of proximity or distance to a core or exemplary member of a category. Examples of Focus are the italicised expressions in ‘literally redemptive’ or ‘typically, they are sophisticated financial institutions’. Force consists in the modulation of the impact of what is stated, as in ‘even more delighted’ or ‘shows much promise’.

Engagement, the system on which this paper focuses, concerns the ways in which speakers or writers position themselves with respect to the content communicated and to possible reactions and responses to their positions. That is to say, Engagement concerns the relation between what is being communicated and other actual or potential viewpoints. Language users may engage or disengage with their own words by quoting, reporting, acknowledging other possibilities, denying, affirming, etc. (Martin and White 2005: 36). The subcategories of Engagement are treated in detail in Section 2.2.

2.2 THE SYSTEM OF ENGAGEMENT

The system of Engagement as defined above is based on the notions of dialogism and heteroglossia (Bakhtin 1981; Voloshinov 1973), inscribed in a dialogic perspective of communication. Within this perspective, all verbal communication is ‘dialogic’ in the sense that to speak or to write is “to reveal the influence of, refer to, or to take up in some way, what has been said / written before, and simultaneously to anticipate the responses of actual, potential or imagined readers/listeners” (Martin and White 2005: 92). The most general distinction within the system of Engagement is that between Monogloss and Heterogloss. Monogloss consists in “not overtly referencing other voices or recognising alternative positions” (Martin and White 2005: 99). Monoglossic utterances are thus not considered in relation to other alternative perspectives. The distinction between Monogloss and Heterogloss cuts across another distinction in the expression of the speaker/writer’s attitude, namely that between epistemic and effective stance (Langacker 2009: 291; Marín-Arrese 2011). Epistemic stance pertains to the speaker/writer’s position concerning knowledge about the states or events designated, while effective stance concerns the ways in which the speaker/writer tries to influence the course of reality. Monoglossic epistemic stance is expressed by bare assertions, as in (2), and monoglossic effective stance by the imperative mood.

(2)The Portuguese Crown granted lands in usufruct to Brazil’s first big landlords. (ETrans_EXP_016)

By contrast, Heterogloss does consider alternative positions. In the case of effective stance, heterogloss includes, for instance, deontic modality, which means obligation, recommendability or permission. The study of Engagement in this paper is restricted to heteroglossic epistemic stance, that is, to the author’s signalling of an explicit position in the transmission of information; effective stance, whose concern is not to inform about the world but to act (or attempt to act) upon it, will not be considered.

For the study of heteroglossic epistemic stance, which from now on will be labelled with the shorter name ‘Heterogloss’, I have adopted the system proposed in Martin and White (2005). The only difference lies in the category of Entertain, which in Martin and White’s model is not divided into subcategories even if they acknowledge that it contains expressions with different meanings, such as expressions of epistemic modality and evidentiality, and pseudo-questions. I believe, however, that it is worth conferring the status of subcategories to these meanings, in order to view their relative weight in the expression of Entertain as a whole. The subcategories are called Estimate, Infer, Speculate and Opine, and will be defined in 2.2.1. below. The resulting system of Heterogloss, explained in the remainder of this subsection, is synoptically presented in Table 1.

Table 1. The system of Engagement used in this paper. The labels in italics are the additions to Martin and White’s (2005) proposed in this research.

The remainder of this section is an account of the subcategories of Heterogloss. The account is illustrated with expressions that commonly realise concrete categories, even if the value of each expression ultimately depends on the context in which it occurs. Other expressions, however, are not easily assigned to a given category; some instances of these are treated in Section 5.

2.2.1 Expansion

Expansion is a subtype of Heterogloss, which “corresponds to utterances which acknowledge dialogically alternative positions and voices” (Martin and White 2005: 102). There is no strong support of the position presented; rather, other possible positions are acknowledged as deserving consideration. Not surprisingly, Expansion often has the effect of weakening assertiveness. Expansion is subdivided into two categories: Entertain and Attribute.

The Entertain option consists in “presenting the proposition as grounded in its own contingent, individual subjectivity, [so that] the authorial voice represents the proposition as but one of a range of possible positions” (Martin and White 2005: 98). As stated in the Introduction, Martin and White approach Entertain as a broad category encompassing expressions with different meanings, which have the common function expressed in the definition. However, I believe that the analysis benefits from a finer grained distinction between submeanings. Two of them correspond to the conceptual categories of epistemic modality and evidentiality, two categories which qualify commitment to the information transmitted (Nuyts 2001; Carretero and Zamorano-Mansilla 2013). The difference lies in that epistemic modality does so in terms of probability, as in the English example (3), the Spanish example (4) and its English translation (5), while evidentiality concerns the kind or source of evidence, as in (6). Epistemic modality, and evidentiality to a lesser extent, have often been treated in the literature as expressing commitment to the truth of a proposition. However, Martin and White (2005: 109) state that the main function of epistemic and evidential expressions in actual discourse is not to qualify commitment to the truth of a proposition, but to indicate dialogism, i.e. consideration of alternative points of view. I believe, however, that the meaning of epistemic and evidential expressions in terms of commitment to the truth of a proposition is not incompatible with the expression of dialogism, but rather is a subtype of dialogism; indeed, to qualify the content communicated by means of an estimation of probability or by assessing the evidence available implies the consideration of alternative states or events as other possibilities:

(3)Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to. (EO_EXP_003)

(4)Pero, quizás porque se habían tomado en serio su destino de dueños del mundo, se habían embarcado en tantas empresas que estaban desbordados (SO_ESS_003)

(5)But, maybe because they had taken their destiny as rulers of the world seriously, they had embarked upon so many endeavours that they were overwhelmed. (ETrans_ESS_003)

(6)And yet there are few signs that working- and middle-class Americans are living any better than they did 35 years ago. Even stranger, productivity growth does not seem to be soaring, as one would expect; (EO_ESS_006)

It is true that these expressions display cases where the epistemic or evidential meaning is bleached into a more general dialogic function, as in (7), where the real reason for using perhaps is to save face rather than to express a qualification of probability:

(7)But briefly, and perhaps a little misleadingly, I can at least state that my point of view entails that it is our present lack of understanding of the fundamental laws of physics that prevents us from coming to grips with the concept of ‘mind’ in physical or logical terms. (EO_EXP_015)

Therefore, the specific consideration of epistemic and evidential expressions as subtypes of Entertain may well bring about differences between tendencies in the realisation of this category depending on the language and discourse type. Consequently, two subcategories have been created for these types of expressions; in keeping with the other labels in the Appraisal framework, these subcategories have been named with verbs that indicate what the speaker/ writer does with language when s/he uses them. The labels chosen are ‘Estimate’ for epistemic modal expressions, and ‘Infer’ for evidential expressions. It must be noted that Estimate and Infer only include epistemic and evidential expressions that do not express a high degree of commitment to the validity of the information: strong epistemic and evidential expressions enhance assertiveness and hence lie within the scope of Contraction, as will be seen in 2.2.2. Nor does Infer include expressions that mention the persons or things (such as reports or studies) that provide evidence; these expressions are classified under “Attribute”, as will be seen below in this section.

Examples of Estimate expressions in English are: modal auxiliaries (may, might, could, must, should) when they express epistemic modality; adverbs (perhaps, probably, maybe…); adjectives (likely); mental state verbs in the first person when they occur with verifiable utterances (I think, I believe), and expressions with nouns such as expectations, possibility or risk. Spanish correlates of all these expressions have been found in the texts. Examples of realisations of Infer are lexical verbs (seem, appear…), adverbs (allegedly, apparently, presumably, reportedly, seemingly…) and their Spanish equivalents.

Another subcategory of Entertain will include those cases in which a dialogic alternative is presented without expressing a specific degree of commitment. To this kind belong the expository questions specifically included within Entertain in Martin and White (2005: 110) although not as a subcategory, such as (8) and its Spanish translation (9), as well as conditional clauses that present the proposition without expressing commitment to its truth or falsity (10), and expressions of lack of knowledge (11). The name chosen for the category is ‘Speculate’. By contrast, pseudo-questions assuming an obvious answer belong to Contraction, subcategory Concur (Martin and White 2005: 123), as will be seen in 2.2.2.

(8)to what extent are minds functionally dependent upon the physical structures with which they are associated? (EO_EXP_015)

(9)¿en qué medida [la mente] depende de las estructuras físicas a las que está asociada? (STrans_EXP_015)

(10)If Greece does well, its creditors will receive more of their money (EO_ESS_001)

(11)It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with this issue. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate. (EO_EXP_020)

A further meaning within Entertain that could not be accommodated in the subcategories mentioned above concerns the cases where the writer indicates that what s/he is communicating is his/her own opinion, which may well coexist with other opinions. These cases, signalled with the category Opine, differ from Estimate and Infer in that the truth of the proposition is treated as non-verifiable; that is, the utterance has no objective truth and consequently the writer’s opinion may well coexist with other different opinions (Carretero and Zamorano-Mansilla 2013: 324-325). Some expressions of Opine are arguably, in my opinion or to my mind.

Martin and White also include deontic modality as part of Entertain (2005: 110-111) but, as was stated above, the deontic category expresses effective stance and is therefore excluded from the analysis. Therefore, the Entertain system devised for this research consists of four categories: Estimate, Infer, Speculate and Opine.

The other subcategory of Expansion is Attribute, which covers the representations of the proposition as grounded in the subjectivity of an external voice, thus situating it within a range of possible positions (Martin and White 2005: 98). In other words, the information is attributed to an external source and the writer does not express a high degree of commitment (the cases in which the writer subscribes to the information belong to Contraction, subcategory Endorse, as will be seen in 4.2.1.). I adopt Martin and White’s (2005) division of Attribute into the subcategories of Acknowledge and Distance.

Acknowledge comprises the cases in which the source of the information is specified, but the writer gives no clues about his/her own position. The expressions of Acknowledge include verbs of saying and of thinking with persons different from the first (he/she thinks, they say, it is said… X reports / states / declares / announces / believes / thinks…), and expressions of opinion by persons different from the writer (in X’s opinion / view…, according to X…). Distance differs from Acknowledge in that the authorial voice explicitly distances itself from the information transmitted by the specified source (Martin and White 2005: 113), by expressing or implying that this information is false or at least unreliable. Examples of Distance are (12), as well as (13) and its English translation (14):

(12)In other words, we are producing and consuming much more than our economic indicators suggest – and the creators of many of those products are not being adequately compensated. (EO_ESS_006)

(13)Sólo faltaban mil años para que los fuegos purificadores del juicio final arrasaran el mundo, según creían los hombres del siglo XV (SO_EXP_003)