<p><strong>"Hunston shows how a suitable corpus linguistics methodology can be applied to validate theories of discourse analysis."</strong><em> - Nick Moore, Khalifa Universtiy of Science Technology and Research, United Arab Emirates</em></p>
<p><strong>'... 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.'</strong> - <em>Discourse Studies</em></p>
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.
Phraseology, as explored in corpus linguistics, is important to the study of evaluative language. Corpus techniques reveal this phraseology and so assist in, for example, identifying modal meaning and intensifying phrases. The patterns identified by corpus techniques can be used in identifying and parsing instances of evaluation.
1. Evaluative Language, Phraseology and Corpus Linguistics 2. Appraisal, Stance, Evaluation 3. Status in Written Texts and Multi-Modal Text 4. Evaluation, Quantity and Meaning 5. Modal-Like Expressions 6. Corpus Approaches to Investigating Status 7. Grammar Patterns, Local Grammars, and Evaluation 8. Phraseology, Intensity and Density 9. Conclusion