Explanation:
In its widest understanding, evaluative language (EL) includes the range of linguistic
resources that may be used to express language users’ attitude or stance (views or feelings) to entities in the real world (e.g., France is a beautiful country; I love my children)
or to propositions (e.g., I’m sure they are right; it is essential that they start now). EL
expresses speakers’ or writers’ views of the world (representational dimension) and, at
the same time, typically engages with, shapes, and influences others’ views and feelings (interpersonal dimension). To the extent that EL is expected at particular points in
texts and speech (e.g., laziness is never a virtue … at the end of a fairy tale) it also has
cohesive properties (structural dimension).
Evaluation may be expressed along various parameters including: levels of certainty/probability; obligation/desirability; appreciation and judgment; emotive impact;
relevance/importance; reliability; expectedness; comprehensibility, etc. Most of these
parameters work on a basic high/low or positive/negative continuum. Further key
variables affecting the nature and impact of evaluation are: the source (whether the
evaluation is authorial or attributed to third parties), the target (e.g., whether entities
or people or the material presented), the degree of subjectivity versus factuality
embedded in the evaluation (e.g., brilliant may be a more subjective evaluation than
thin, referring to a person), and levels of explicitness (e.g., I felt embarrassed is a more
explicit way of referring to one’s feelings than saying: I didn’t know what to say).
While some evaluative meanings, including levels of certainty and obligation, may
be associated with specific linguistic items (e.g., modal verbs and adverbs in some languages), others, such as positive or negative appreciation, are typically realized cumulatively over long stretches of text/speech and through varying and unpredictable lexicogrammatical operators.
The distinction between evaluative and nonevaluative language is often problematic
in that evaluative meaning is particularly context-dependent so that many expressions
may be primarily factual in some contexts (e.g., a red car) and evaluative (positive or
negative) in others (e.g., a red nose or red lips). The criteria for positive and negative
evaluation of specific entities (e.g., places, products, and people) rely to a large extent
on unstable and varying sociocultural assumptions and expectations. Evaluation is,
therefore, often implicit in the description of events rather than explicitly conveyed.
A Victorian property, for example, may be a neutral or positive description, depending
on the value placed on particular period properties by particular people at particular
times. Similarly, in any advertising context, descriptions assigned to a product acquire a
positive connotation simply in the light of the overall promotional function of the text,
