Evaluative Language in English Job Advertisements in Diachronic Perspective

Abstract

The received view has it that genres are subject to historical changes with respect to their functional and language features. The purpose of this article is to examine changes in the evaluation language employed in the genre of British job advertisement, in this way revealing shifts and developments in this type of discourse practice. Drawing on evidence from the corpus of job advertisements published in the Times, the national British newspaper, in the period between 1896 and 2006, this paper proposes an analysis of evaluative language usage in three collections of job advertisements from late nineteenth, middle twentieth centuries, and the 2000s. The regularities present in the data were calculated manually for every period under consideration. The comparative analysis of the data obtained for each of the synchronic layers introduces diachronic perspective into the study by revealing changes in evaluative language throughout the periods as they are reflected in an average ratio of adjectives per text, distribution of evaluative and descriptive adjectives, frequency of the entities evaluated and semantic variation of the adjectives used to evaluate entities. The aim of the study is to understand the changing role of evaluation in the genre, the way evaluative adjectives work, the role they play in persuading the applicant.

Descriptive Analysis of Emoticons/Emoji and Persuasive Digital Language Use in WhatsApp Messages

“…Greenwald (1968) Regarding several studies conducted concerning digital job advertisements (Kochetova & Volodchenkova, 2015), text messages (Golonka, Tare, & Bonilla, 2017;Hinnenkamp, 2008), twitter tweets (Schnoebelen, 2012) results of the current study explored that the participants mostly tended to use a particular persuasive language. For instance, the study by Kochetova and Volodchenkova (2015) reveals that the employers tend to present evaluative adjectives referring to emotions of potential applicants. Golonka, Tare, and Bonilla (2017) find out that learners of Russian frequently tend to negotiate for meaning and use their partners to clarify and elicit information and provide help for unknown words.…”

“…There are studies on digital language produced by human beings in computerized environments such as emails, web sites, chat platforms, etc. For example, the study by Kochetova and Volodchenkova (2015) (Blankenship & Craig, 2011;Greenwald, 1968;Love & Greenwald, 1978;Wood, 2000). According to Greenwald (1968)…”

An Analysis of the Engagement System of Vietnamese Research Articles in the Light of the Appraisal Framework

“…There are 9 expressions for 30 words of concur, mostly including adjectives, of which the most common are rõ ràng (obvious) and tất yếu (inevitable). For example: (11) Hiển nhiên là người học càng biết nhiều từ thì độ hiểu văn bản càng tăng. (It is obvious that the more learners know, the higher the degree of text absorption is) (Vres 19)…”

“…Martin and White modelized their theory of evaluation into an "Appraisal Framework". This framework has been used as the theoretical foundation for evaluative language analysis in numerous studies on a range of materials and for a variety of purposes: (1) on a variety of fields and genres, such as political discourses (Helander, 2014;Mazlum & Afshin, 2016), language of advertisements (Kochetova & Volodchenkova, 2015); textbooks, historical materials (Coffin, 2006;Myskow, 2017); (2) to demonstrate the pedagogical implications and applicability of using the framework in English teaching and learning (Liu, 2010;Hu & Choo, 2015); (3) to provide evidence that the framework can be used in languages other than English, such as Korean (Bang & Shin, 2012), Spanish (Taboada & Carretero, 2010), Chinese (Kong, 2006), Vietnamese (Ngo, 2013), etc.…”

Evaluative Language in Conclusion Sections of Vietnamese Linguistic Research Articles

“…The Appraisal Framework of Martin and White (2005) is adopted as the theoretical background to analyse evaluative language in many studies on various materials and for different purposes: (1) on a variety of fields and genres such as political discourses (Jalilifar & Savaedi, 2012;Mazlum & Afshin, 2016), language of advertisements (Kochetova & Volodchenkova, 2015); textbooks, historical materials (Coffin, 2006;Myskow, 2017Myskow, , 2018; (2) to prove pedagogical implications and practicality of applying the framework in English teaching and learning (Hu & Choo, 2015;Liu, 2010); (3) to give evidence that the framework can be applied in other languages beside English such as Korean (Bang & Shin, 2012, Spanish (Taboada & Carretero, 2010), Chinese (Kong, 2006), Vietnamese (Ngo, 2013), etc. Especially, evaluative language of academic discourses is examined on various corpora from students' persuasive or argumentative essays (Chen, 2010;Giles & Busseniers, 2012;McEnery & Kifle, 2002) to the Introduction or Discussion sections of master's and doctoral theses (Gabrielatos & McEnery, 2005;Geng & Wharton, 2016), etc.…”