Evaluative Meanings and Disciplinary Values - eTheses Repository ...

The above concordances are extracted from business sub-disciplines such as accounting, law
and management. No examples present a fully positive degree of optimism except line 04.
The writer particularly argues his/her view of non-optimism through linguistic markers such
as but, while and less (underlined in the examples above). As the following expanded versions
of line 01 with but and 02 with while and more illustrate, optimistic about N tends to occur in
:
Analysts may be optimistic about earnings, but if investors use the correct discount rate, analyst
optimism will not lead to an overstated risk premium, but to an inflated price.
(Accounting2005_2)
For example, while it seems that owners who own larger firms are more optimistic about future
increased sales, it would not be appropriate to suggest, based on these results, that smaller firms
"just need to get larger" in order to become more optimistic; (BC: Management2000_31)
In the first example, the writer overtly expresses his/her doubtful attitude towards analysts
optimism about earnings, by presenting a counter-example in a but clause. In the second
example, the writer implicitly suggests that the size of firms is not closely relevant to owners
optimism about future increased sales. That is, the LSP optimistic about N tends to feature in
phraseologies that contrast positive observations about current states of affairs with more
negative assessments on the part of the writer. Through this argument structure, writers in BC
cast doubt on conventional ways of thinking, and suggest new (and rather more cautious)
ways of looking at things. It is also important to note that this argument structure does not
occur at all in ALC. This being the case, it is reasonable to claim that this particular LSP
expresses very different modalities of evaluation in the academic discourses of applied
linguistics and business studies.
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