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In:Corpora, Grammar and Discourse: In honour of Susan Hunston
Edited by Nicholas Groom, Maggie Charles and Suganthi John
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 73] 2015
► pp. 257–282

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Chapter 11. “What we contrarians already know”

Individual and communal aspects of attitudinal identity

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Published online: 30 October 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.73.12bed
Starting from the assumption that “[e]valuation is personal, private, subjective” (Hunston 2011: 12), this chapter ties evaluation explicitly to the notion of identity. It discusses ‘attitudinal identity’, which concerns positive and negative value judgements and positions, and claims that the construal of attitudinal identities is particularly important in publicly mediated texts. Combining discourse and corpus analysis, the chapter explores how specific features of language use (evaluations, pronouns) are employed by individuals to construe attitudinal personae as well as to align with others and to invite audiences into what I shall refer to as shared ‘communities of attitude’. The empirical focus of the paper will be on the Australian scientific radio programme Ockham’s Razor.
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