Corpus Approaches to Evaluation - Phraseology and Evaluative Language (Electronic book text)

This book applies a set of corpus investigation techniques to the study of evaluation, or stance, or affect, in naturally-occurring discourse. Evaluative language indicates opinions, attitudes, and judgments. It is an important part of activities such as persuading someone that a particular viewpoint is correct, or in constructing knowledge from a different number of theories. This book argues that phraseology--regularities or patterns in language identifiable from corpus studies--is important to the study of evaluative language. It makes a number of more specific arguments: that modal meaning is expressed through particular phrases and not only through modal verbs; that figurative phrases are used to intensify evaluation; and that patterns of use may be exploited to achieve an automatic identification of evaluations. It also builds on the author s previous work in exploring how films and journalism use language and images to build knowledge from ideas. "