A growing public awareness of the potential negative impacts of corporate activities on the natural environment and society compels large companies to invest increasing resources in the communication of their responsible conduct. This paper employs Appraisal theory in a comparative analysis of BP's and IKEA's 2009 social reports, each company's record of their nonfinancial performance. The main objective is to explore how, through Appraisal resources, BP and IKEA construct their corporate identity and relationship with their stakeholders. The analysis reveals two markedly different approaches to the construction of a responsible corporate identity. While BP deploys interpersonal resources to portray itself as a trustworthy and authoritative expert, IKEA discloses itself as a sensitive and caring corporation, engaged in a continual effort to improve. These differences are interpreted in light of the legitimisation challenges the two companies face.

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This article proposes a novel theoretical framework for examining trust-repair discourse. The model identifies two fundamental discourse strategies available to the trust-breaker when trust is at stake (i) to engage with and act upon the discourses that represent a potential source of distrust -neutralize the negative, (ii) to communicate a trustworthy discourse identity -emphasize the positive. These strategies are realized in discourse through the use of dialogic engagement and evaluative/a↵ective language, respectively. The ultimate communicative goal of the strategies is that of promoting the addressees' positive (re-)assessment of the speaker's ability, integrity and benevolence. The model is applied to the analysis of the CEO letter published by BP one year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The analysis has the twofold purpose of demonstrating the viability of the model and determining the discourse strategies deployed by the CEO to repair trust in the company after the accident.

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This paper presents a scenario-based experiment designed to test the effects of trust-building strategies, realised in stance-taking acts, which a previous corpus-based study found to be salient features of stakeholder-facing corporate communication. The experiment relies on a betweensubjects design in which a target group of subjects are exposed to trust-building strategies while another control group are not. We apply this paradigm to corporate discourse in the form of an About Us webpage produced by a fictitious multinational pharmaceutical company that has been accused by a whistleblower of corporate misconduct. The results of the study show that these strategies are indeed effective in fostering trust in the company and have an indirect positive effect on the perceived credibility of the company's denial in response to the allegations made by the whistleblower. The strategies are therefore able to mitigate the potential damage caused by public accusations of wrongdoing and help companies insure against future threats to their legitimacy and freedom to operate, as when their behaviour violates, or is said to violate, societal norms and values. Theoretically, the results provide insights into the psychological mechanisms of trustbuilding and reader response. Methodologically, the study contributes to the growing body of work using experimental methods in CDA by further demonstrating that experimentation can usefully complement more traditional discourse-analytical methods as a form of triangulation.

Despite a growing awareness of methodological issues, the literature on appraisal has not so far provided adequate answers to some of the key challenges involved in reliably identifying and classifying evaluative language expressions. This article presents a stepwise method for the manual annotation of appraisal in text that is designed to optimize reliability, replicability and transparency. The procedure consists of seven steps, from the creation of a context-specific annotation manual to the statistical analysis of the quantitative data derived from the manually-performed annotations. By presenting this method, the article pursues the twofold purpose of (i) providing a practical tool that can facilitate more reliable, replicable and transparent analyses, and (ii) fostering a discussion of the best practices that should be observed when manually annotating appraisal.

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.

It has been suggested that metaphor often performs some sort of evaluative function. However, there have been few empirical studies addressing this issue. Moreover, little is known about the extent to which a metaphor needs to be creative in order to perform an evaluative function, or whether there are differences according to the type of evaluation, such as its degree of explicitness and its polarity. In order to investigate these questions, 94 film reviews from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) were annotated for creative and conventional metaphor, and for positive and negative, inscribed and invoked evaluation. Approximately half of the metaphors in our corpus were found to perform an evaluative function. Creative metaphors were significantly more likely to perform an evaluative function than conventional metaphors. Metaphorical evaluation was found to be significantly more negative than non-metaphorical evaluation. Both creative and conventional metaphors were used more frequently to perform inscribed evaluation than invoked evaluation. However, the tendency towards inscribed evaluation was stronger for conventional metaphors than for creative metaphors. From a theoretical perspective, these findings call into question fundamental assumptions about the role of metaphor in performing evaluation, such as the claim, made in the Systemic Functional Linguistics literature, that metaphor invariably ‘provokes’ attitudinal meanings. We have shown that it can do so, but that it does not always do so. The study also offers methodological contributions, by introducing a new protocol for the annotation of creative metaphors as well as detailed guidelines for coding evaluation at different levels of explicitness.