Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

ideology of the discourse community; ideologies are constructed and transmitted only through
texts, and only texts can reveal their nature. The notion that ideologies are produced and
reproduced in and through texts is quite common among linguists in this field (e.g.
Caldas-Coulthard & Coulthard, 1996; Fairclough, 1989, 1992; Fowler, 1990; Hodge & Kress,
1993; Meinhof & Richardson, 1994; Stubbs, 1996). As Hunston (1993, p. 57) points out, the
ideology within which a text is written constrains choices in discourse organization, grammar
and lexis (cf. Kress & Hodge, 1979; Martin, 1986; Fairclough, 1988; Stotesbury, 2003). This
being the case, it is reasonable to suppose that such constraints will also operate at the level of
phraseological patterning, as discussed in Section 3.3 earlier.
If it is the case that academic texts reproduce and are reproduced by disciplinary
ideologies, it is also reasonable to hypothesise that different disciplines would use evaluation
in different ways (Stotesbury, 2003, p. 331). Indeed, Burgess and Fagan (2001) succeed in
showing disciplinary differences in RAs between younger disciplines and older disciplines in
that the former may show greater internal variation in discourse practices than the latter.
Rongen Breivega, Dahl, and Fløttum (2002) also find that cultural identity in academic prose
differs between disciplines, and that these differences may outweigh those differences that are
attributable to general linguistic differences, that is, between, say academic written English
and academic written Spanish (cf. Stotesbury, 2003, p. 332). One of the main purposes in the
current study is to reveal differences in the phraseological manifestations of evaluation in
applied linguistics and business studies, with a particular focus on lexico-grammatical
patterns and their behaviours in disciplinary texts.
Before moving on, it is important to clarify that although the current study adopts a
PG approach to discourse analysis as established in the evaluation theory of Hunston and
Sinclair (2000), it also makes use of a classification scheme borrowed from another approach
to evaluation analysis: appraisal theory, developed by Martin and Rose (2003, 2007) and
White (2004). Specifically, I will appropriate the general category label attitude and its three
sub-classifications, judgement, affect and appreciation, from Appraisal theory. However, my
own analysis will not employ or be constrained by the particular approach to analysis or the
detailed set of theoretical assumptions that the Appraisal framework puts forward.
3.5.1. Evaluative properties of ADJ PREP N patterns
Evaluation is inclined to be expressed through not mere lexical items such as verbs and
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