INSPECCIÓN ANTES DE CONDUCIR

Linguists have been concerned with studying the expression of speaker opinion since the 1980s. A set of overlapping labels have been adopted in order to define, describe and analyse this area of interpersonal meaning. These include affect (Ochs, 1989); modality (Palmer, 1986; 2001); evidentiality (Chafe, 1986; Chafe and Nicols, 1986); point of view (Simpson, 1993); attitude (Halliday, 1994); hedging (Hyland, 1996); epistemic modality (Hyland, 1998); stance and engagement (Hyland, 2005); evaluation/evaluating entities and propositions (Hunston, 1994; Hunston and Thompson, 2000); subjectivity (Lyons, 1981, 1994); stance (Biber and Finegan, 1988;1989; Biber et al., 1999; Hyland, 1999; 2005; Conrad and Biber, 2000; Englebretson, 2007; Jaffe, 2009), and appraisal (Martin, 2000a; White, 2003; Martin and Rose, 2003; Martin and White, 2005). The study of speaker opinion departed from subjectivity, the most general concept of these alternatives which is derived from logical (Aristotelian) notions of possibility and necessity, to which Lyons (1977, 1981) subscribed. Subjectivity is another alternative term for evaluation (Englebrestson, 2007, p.16). According to Lyons (1994 p.13), this is ―quite simply, self-expression in the use of language.‖

Stance and evaluation are the closely related broad cover terms for the above mentioned categorizations, since they refer to ‗‗the expression of speaker or writer‘s attitude towards, view point on, feelings about the entities and propositions that he or she is talking about‘‘ (Hunston and Thompson, 2000, p.5). In addition, Hunston and Thompson‘s (2000) preferred broad cover term, evaluation, has been considered to be the most comprehensive, and syntactically and morphologically flexible, as it requires a source and evaluates entities and propositions (Bednarek, 2006).

Stance has been defined as ―personal feelings, attitudes, value judgments, or assessments‖ (Biber et al., 1999, p.966). Thus, stance is viewed as ‗‗comparative, subjective value laden‘‘ (Hunston and Thompson, 2000, p.13). Likewise, evaluation has been broadly defined in terms of subjectivity, i.e. as ―being concerned with self- expression of the speaker‘s attitudes, beliefs, feelings, emotions, judgments, will, personality, etc.‖ (Lyons, 1982, pp.103, 110 quoted in Bednarek, 2006, p.20,

emphasis added). This definition also clarifies that, like stance, evaluation is both evaluative and subjective (Englebrestson, 2007, p.17).

Like evaluation, stance is also related to speaker engagement, i.e. it has an interactive dialogic (inter/subjective) dimension. This view is held by Hyland (2005), who states that evaluation includes stance, which refers to a ‗textual voice‘ or a ‗personality‘ recognized by a community of readers, i.e. the writer‘s involvement, or engagement which refers to writer‘s positioning in relation to other voices. In this way, evaluative stance is viewed as ―a dynamic process of positioning throughout the text‖ (Hood, 2004; original emphasis) in which the writer depends on a value system of ―restricted subsets of options/standards/parameters‖ (Hyland, 2005, p.175). That is, as Hyland (2018) argues, ―Personal judgments are only convincing, or even meaningful, when they contribute to and connect with a communal ideology or value system concerning what is taken to be normal, interesting, relevant, novel, useful, good, bad, and so on‖ (p.136). This dynamic discourse process involves ―the strategic deployment of resources of interpersonal meaning‖ (Hood, 2004, p.10). Writers persuade their readers by ―making rhetorical choices which evaluate both their propositions, and their audience‖ (ibid.). For example, the speaker/writer chooses from the engagement system options, in order to negotiate social relations of power and solidarity to align with the value system of their community. The meaning choices may contract or expand the discourse for existing or expected views. Therefore, these two theoretical concepts refer to interpersonal meaning which is not only a subjective self- expression as illustrated by Lyons‘ (1981) definition of subjectivity, but also intersubjective/ dialogic resources from the stance and evaluation researchers point of view.

The literature on evaluation research generated further distinctions approaching the question of studying interpersonal meaning from theoretical and methodological perspectives. Evaluation is viewed as ―subjectivity with a focus‖ (Englebrestson, 2007, p.15). Echoing Hunston and Thompson‘s (2000, p.5) definition of evaluation, Englebretson (2007) indicates that this focus is related to the main distinction between two types of interpersonal meaning (affect/attitude and modality) with regard to what is evaluated, ―entities or propositions.‖ Linguists, accordingly, adopt either a ―separating approach‖, emphasising differences, or a ―combining approach‖,

emphasising partial similarities between the two types of opinion (Hunston and Thompson, 2000, p.4).

The former includes the approaches adopted by Halliday (1994), namely, modality (modalization and modulation) which is separated from attitudinal meaning; Bybee and Fleischman‘s (1995) distinction between modality (epistemic and deontic) and evaluation (speaker viewpoint); Martin‘s appraisal (2000a) which includes three subcategories of attitudinal meaning, viz. affect, judgment, appreciation (Hunston and Thompson, 2000, p.4). The latter includes Biber and Finegan‘s (1988, p.3) six semantic categories of stance adverbials (labelled manner of speaking, approximation, conviction/certainty, actuality/emphasis, possibility/likelihood and attitude); Hunston and Thompson‘s (2000) supercategory, ‗evaluation‘ with modality as a subcategory; Martin and White‘s (2004,2005) system of appraisal with its subsystems of attitude, engagement and graduation; and Bednarek‘s (2006) parameter-based approach to evaluation in media discourse which includes nine parameters or sub-values, namely, comprehensibility, emotivity, expectedness, importance, possibility/necessity, reliability, evidentiality, mental state, and style (ibid).

In addition, the research on interpersonal meaning has adopted ―complementary methodologies‖ which involve either detailed analysis of a single sample of text or empirical investigation focusing on generalizations in large computer-based corpora (Biber, 2006, p.88). Some researchers (Bednarek, 2006) complement their quantitative corpus analysis of stance with manual qualitative analysis of representative texts. This complementarity of quantitative (multi-dimensional analysis of stance) and qualitative (Martin and White‘s (2004) appraisal) approaches has been suggested when researchers are aiming to overcome issues such as the intractability of (implicit) stance and appraisal (Martin, 2003, p.172). These research complementarities provide more practicality in tracing both explicit and implicit evaluation, giving more insights into the co-text, context and development of evaluation.

More importantly, Martin (2003, p.172) points out that appraisal analysis (qualitative) has been formulated to answer two important research questions. One has to do with the systematicity of affect/attitudinal meanings and has been solved by organizing attitude into three systems: affect, judgment and appreciation (ibid,

p.173). The second is concerned with ‗hedging‘ (also evidentiality/epistemic stance), and this has been tackled by organizing hedging into engagement (origins and positioning of attitude) and graduation (how feelings are graded) (ibid, p.174). Finally, although Halliday‘s interpersonal metafunction options are important, they are not enough and, as a result, analysis has been expanded to consider axiological or value-laden meanings (Lemke, 1998).