12th March 2025: Sara Villar-Lluch

Wednesday 12th March 2025 (Week 7 of term) 1.10-2pm 

Exploring the contextual sensitivity of evaluation

Dr Sara Vilar Lluch (Cardiff University)

In this talk I will consider some complexities involved in studying evaluation across different registers comprising texts around a same topic (ADHD) produced by professional and lay communities. Broadly understood as the stance that speakers or writers adopt towards what is being talked about and the other participants (or putative readers/ audience) (e.g. Martin & White 2005: 1), it is fair to assume that evaluation plays a central role in our understanding of phenomena and how we relate to things and people in our everyday lives.
The context dependence of evaluation is well-acknowledged. For instance, while words may show a ‘charge of evaluation’ (Tabaoda & Carretero 2012: 277) or ‘infused’ evaluation (Martin & White 2005), some words are evaluative depending on the co-text or surrounding textual context. Considering different registers shows that (i) (unsurprisingly) lexicogrammatical resources that convey evaluation vary; (ii) ‘default’ evaluations (or ‘evaluative charge’ or prosody) may be overridden by register characteristics (e.g. goal, interpersonal relationships) and lexicogrammatical resources used; (iii) benchmarks for evaluation (or what ‘positive’/‘negative’ means) may differ across professional—e.g. clinical—and lay registers. For the case considered, the latter suggests that a theory of appraisal should be able to accommodate non-normality evaluations (vis-à-vis negative normality) or absence of polarity—here, to account for how people may make sense of a diagnosis. From an applied perspective, these considerations raise the question of how the register dependency of evaluation can be effectively operationalised to inform automatic extraction of sentiment.

References

Martin, J. R., & White, P. R. R. (2003). The language of evaluation. Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Taboada, M., & Carretero, M. (2012). Contrastive analyses of evaluation in text: Key issues in the design of an annotation system for attitude applicable to consumer reviews in English and Spanish. Linguistics & the Human Sciences, 6.

This session takes place in Room 3.58 of the John Percival Building at Cardiff University or can be accessed via Teams using this link.