Manual corpus annotation facilitates exhaustive and detailed corpus-based analyses of evaluation that would not be possible with purely automatic techniques. However, manual annotation is a complex and subjective process. Most studies adopting this approach have paid insufficient attention to the methodological challenges involved in manually annotating evaluation, in particular concerning transparency, reliability and replicability. This article illustrates a procedure for annotating evaluative expressions in text that facilitates more transparent, reliable and replicable analyses. The method is demonstrated through a case study analysis of APPRAISAL (Martin and White, 2005) in a small-size specialized corpus of CEO letters published by the British energy company BP and four competitors before and after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010. Drawing on Fuoli and Paradis' (2014) model of trust-repair discourse, it examines how ATTITUDE and ENGAGEMENT resources are strategically deployed by BP's CEO in the attempt to repair stakeholders' trust after the accident.

Living with a life-limiting cancer illness can entail a turmoil of feelings such as constant fear of loss, suffering and dying. Because patients live longer with life-limiting illness, there is a need for enhanced understanding of how people make sense of and cope with the complicated aspects that this life situation brings on. In this article, we explore how bloggers with advanced cancer use metaphors as ways of making sense of their experiences. Our study is theoretically grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, where metaphors are seen as a powerful phenomenon that both reflects and affects our thinking. The data consist of a corpus of blogs written in Swedish by individuals with advanced cancer, and the findings from our linguistic metaphor analysis are consistently interpreted against the backdrop of literature on coping. Our study thus highlights the intersection of linguistic metaphor analysis and psychological theories of coping by illustrating the many and complex functions metaphors can have as part of sense-making processes. Our hermeneutic approach enables us to show some differences among the three most pervasive metaphor domains in our material, battle, journey and imprisonment: the journey and imprisonment domains are more flexible than the battle domain in terms of the different kinds of coping strategies that are actualised by the bloggers’ use of metaphors. One particular finding from our analysis is the way in which the bloggers make use of metaphors to compartmentalise experiences and emotions. Our contention is that careful attention to the metaphors used by patients can improve communication in healthcare and enhance understanding of the complex role language use plays in coping processes more generally. By highlighting the relation between metaphor use and coping, our analysis also provides a way to discuss coping strategies based on the patient’s own use of language.

Background: The significance of metaphors for the experience of cancer has been the topic of extensive previous research, with "Battle" and "Journey" metaphors standing out as key. Adaptation to the patient's use of metaphor is generally believed to be an important aspect of person-centered care, especially in palliative care. The aim of this study was to investigate the use of metaphors in blogs written in Swedish by people living with advanced cancer and explore possible patterns associated with individuals, age and gender. Methods: The study is based on a dataset totaling 2,602,479 words produced some time during the period 2007-2016 by 27 individuals diagnosed with advanced cancer. Both qualitative and quantitative procedures were used, and the findings are represented as raw frequencies as well as normalized frequencies per 10,000 words. Our general approach was exploratory and descriptive. The Mann-Whitney U test was used to analyze statistical significance. Results: Our results confirm the strong foothold of "Journey" and "Battle" metaphors. "Imprisonment" and "Burden" metaphors were also used by the majority of the individuals. The propensity to use metaphors when describing the cancer experience was found to differ extensively across the individuals. However, individuals were not found to opt for one conceptualization over the other but tended to draw on several different metaphor domains when conceptualizing their experience. Socio-demographic factors such as age or gender were not found to be strong predictors of metaphor choice in this limited study. Conclusions: Using a range of different metaphors allows individuals with advanced cancer to highlight different aspects of their experience. The presence of metaphors associated with "Journey", "Battle", "Imprisonment" and "Burden" across individuals could be explained by the fact that the bloggers are part of a culturally consistent cohort, despite variations in age, sex and cancer form. Awareness of metaphors commonly used by patients can enhance health professionals' capacity to identify metaphorical patterns and develop a common language grounded in the patients' own metaphor use, which is an important requisite for person-centered palliative care.

This paper explores the language used by critics to appraise wine, at the same time investigating the validity and usefulness of categories in the Appraisal framework, as set out by Martin & White (2005). Our analysis of a corpus of wine reviews suggests that sub-categories of Appreciation — used to evaluate products, and non-human targets by reference to aesthetics and other values — may need extending or enhancing in terms of delicacy, depending on the register of the texts under investigation. An adapted version of the Appraisal system of Attitude is used as basis for our investigation. The assessment of our adapted model was carried out in the form of a comparison between two analysts’ independent annotations which function as a basis for a critical discussion of the proposed categories. The bulk of the paper discusses the relevance of our findings for the analysis of specialised genres in general, the field of wine criticism in particular and the application of the Appraisal model for discourse analysis. We conclude that the understanding and application of analytical categories is dependent on the analyst’s previous experience with the Appraisal model as well as acquaintance with the discourse field.

Recent years have seen a rapid influx of reviews in the field of different aesthetic and consumption domains, which is indicative of the importance assigned by present-day society to what we choose to experience and consume. Given their prevalence, there is a need to find an adequate analytic framework which allows insightful understanding of the discursive construction of such reviews. This paper aims to propose such a framework by combining tools from the Appraisal model with ideas from argumentation theory. The combined methodology is demonstrated using one text from a corpus of wine reviews written by the extraordinarily influential wine critic Robert Parker. The analysis takes into consideration both meanings that are internal to the text and meanings that are text-external, so-called world knowledge. I argue that the technique of reconstruction adopted from argumentation theory helps to highlight and explain how the appraisal works in the text. The findings are generalizable to the extent that the methodology can be used for any type of review text, especially in the domain of present-day luxury consumption, which is not overtly argumentative but which can still be found to have an assessmentbasis format that leads its readers toward a certain worldview that they are invited to co-construct and see as rational.

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