In:Evaluation in Context
Edited by Geoff Thompson † and Laura Alba-Juez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 242] 2014
► pp. 241–258
Register diversification in evaluative language: the case of scientific writing
Published online: 4 February 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.242.12deg
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.242.12deg
In this chapter, we investigate register diversification in evaluative language focusing on scientific writing. For this purpose, we explore selected epistemic and attitudinal variants of evaluative expressions. We consider (1) the situational context of these expressions according to Systemic Functional Linguistics and register theory (cf. Halliday and Hasan 1985; Biber 2006) and (2) selected aspects of their syntagmatic contexts (cf. Hunston 2011). The research questions we pose are (a) which typical evaluative expressions occur in scientific research articles and (b) whether the usage of particular evaluative expressions is rather discipline-specific or discipline-neutral. To answer these questions, we carry out a corpus-based analysis on a corpus of scientific research articles from nine scientific disciplines, combining quantitative and qualitative analytic methods.
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