AAVV - Exploring evaluative, emotive and persuasive strategies in discourse

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). 1Both 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 3states the research hypotheses. Section 4describes the MULTINOT corpus and the method used for analysing the data. Section 5discusses 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 6specifies and discusses the results of the quantitative analysis. Section 7contains a final discussion and concluding remarks.