Corpora and beyond – investigating evaluation in discourse: introduction to the special issue on corpus approaches to evaluation

Abstract

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Genre expectations and discourse community membership in listener reviews of true crime-comedy podcast My Favorite Murder

“…DuBois (2007: 163) defines stance as ‘a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means (language, gesture, and other symbolic forms), through which social actors simultaneously evaluate objects, position subjects (themselves and others), and align with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field’. Research on stance-taking tends to be rooted in conversation analysis as stance-taking is considered to be an action (Goźdź-Roszkowski and Hunston, 2016: 133) and a way for the speaker to (dis)align themselves with their conversation partner(s) and the evaluated object. In the case of online reviews, writers evaluate the product, for instance the podcast, interact with their imagined audience of other podcast listeners and, at times, the podcasts’ hosts.…”

Corpus Linguistics in Legal Discourse

“…Evaluation represents an area of difficulty for researchers, especially those who prioritize corpus linguistics as their principal method of investigation [45,60]. If we assume that evaluation should be associated with a meaning or a type of meaning rather than a form, then any methodological perspective based on identifying and quantifying forms will lead to considerably impoverished findings.…”

“…Most corpus-based studies vary in the degree to which corpus analysis is accompanied or augmented by other types of investigation. It is relatively seldom that research into evaluative language is carried out based on corpus analysis alone [45] For example, Szczyrbak [100] focuses on phrases with 'say' as indicative of the alignment function of stance-taking. The paper identifies the frequency of each phrase in the corpus of libel proceedings before a UK court.…”

Signalling Sites of Contention in Judicial Discourse. An Exploratory Corpus- Based Analysis of Selected Stance Nouns in US Supreme Court Opinions and Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal Judgments

“…On the other hand, the concept of stance or stance-taking (du Bois 2007), construes an action (taking stance) rather than an entity. The act of (dis)alignment between interactants is perhaps of greater importance (Goźdź-Roszkowski & Hunston 2016). Viewed against the backdrop of judicial discourse, the judge who takes a stance construes a relationship between themselves and an external entity and simultaneously between themselves and other legal interactant(s), such as other judges from the same bench, lower court judges, counsel, defence counsel, attorney general, etc.…”