Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

affect is writer-oriented or other-oriented is important in clarifying the ways in which each
discipline treats such an ambiguous phenomenon in people. This is because monogloss is the
realization of subjective emotion whereas heterogloss is the realization of objective
observation. This section will thus attempt to identify the proportion of these two types of
affect as well.
As in the case of judgment reviewed in Section 8.1 earlier, I grouped adjectives into
each of the three groups based on their meanings. A close analysis of these three semantic
groups reveals clear differences in disciplinary attitude in the realization of emotion and in the
discourse functions that this pattern has across the two corpora. The next three sub-sections
will present these findings in detail.
8.2.1. Optimism
The first group of affect is the OPTIMISM group. This group indicates whether a writer or some
other person feels happy, optimistic or pessimistic about a (possible) situation, a future event,
a piece of data, a result, and so on. Compared to other groups within the broad category of
affect, this group is rather future-oriented: people evaluate a possible thing/situation or predict
a future event by identifying something in the present or past that gives grounds for optimism.
Order ALC Freq. BC Freq.
1 confident 11 optimistic 8
2 positive 4 pleased 4
3 optimistic 2 good 2
4 happy 2 happy 1
5 good 1
Total 20 15
Prop 57% 43%
Table 8.10. The OPTIMISM group in A DJ about N
As Table 8.10 shows, adjectives in the OPTIMISM group occur more frequently in ALC than in
BC. In particular, confident and positive more frequently occur in ALC but optimistic and
pleased are preferred by writers in BC. Concordance analysis of these data suggests that in
ALC this pattern is more likely to express the writers own emotions than it does in BC:
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