Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

typically presented as impersonal and objective, that is, as the result of empirical procedures
carried out by teams of disinterested researchers, whereas that in the social sciences (i.e. soft
disciplines) is explicitly personal and subjective, and the result of individual interpretation
(Hyland, 1998; Becher & Trower, 2001). This being the case, it is reasonable to assume that
the soft disciplines are better suited than hard disciplines for investigating writers personal
attitudes inscribed in the discourse.
According to Carter and McCarthy (2006), for example, attributive adjectives (as
adjectives of classification or as pre-modifiers of nouns) occur frequently in scientific and
technical writings (i.e. hard disciplines), whilst predicative (or evaluative) adjectives occur
frequently in humanities (i.e. soft disciplines) as obvious evaluative markers, often
pre-modified by degree adverbs. In other words, it is reasonable to hypothesize that such
evaluation (or stance) markers are more likely to occur in soft disciplines than those in hard
disciplines. In particular, such predicative adjectives are often used in patterns in academic
discourse to express specific meanings and functions such as judgements, feelings, and so on
(cf., Hunston, 2000). Hunston and Sinclair (2000), for example, introduce sample patterns of
adjectives expressing evaluation (e.g. (it) v-link A DJ that/wh-/to-inf, there v-link
something/anything/nothing A DJ about/in N/-ing). Since such attitudinal markers reflect
both writing style and play an important role in constructing personal opinions in the
discourse, the investigation of such markers is invaluable in ascertaining and identifying the
construction of knowledge, style and function in academic discourse, all of which will serve
to identify aspects of disciplinary culture.
The two soft disciplines selected in the current study are applied linguistics and
business studies. Once a somewhat neglected discipline in academic discourse studies
(Flowerdew, 2000), applied linguistics has been the subject of a growing number of studies in
the last decade (e.g. Yang & Allison, 2004; Atai & Falah, 2005; Vázquez, Lafuente, Lorés &
Mur, 2006; Peacock, 2002). However, although some of these studies have made use of
corpus tools and methods, they have tended to be based on rather small collections of data. A
further problem with these studies is that they may not be representative of current issues in
the discipline of applied linguistics, given the fast-moving and rapidly-developing nature of
this discipline (Groom & Littlemore, 2011).
A similar situation applies in the case of business studies. Here, the main problem is
that data samples in previous studies of this discipline tend to be restricted to the particular
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