The negotiation of evaluation in written text

Editors’ introduction Bolívar’s paper deals with evaluation in text. Her wider aim, like that of a number of other contributors here (Sinclair, Coulthard, Edge & Wharton, Scott, Thompson & Thompson, and Hunston), is to understand text as social interaction, but her starting point is the social functions agreed upon by speakers and writers in particular cultures and in particular contexts, from which she moves first to the text-type and thence to evaluation structures. The discussion of structures of evaluation itself leads this paper towards one of the other main themes running through this collection, namely the identification of text-important elements and how these can combine (Fries, Jordan, Berber Sardinha, Renouf, Darnton).

If this contribution is thus coherent with the others in this volume, it is also related to others outside it, notably to those in Hunston & Thompson (2000).

It is through textual change that evaluation shows itself. Thus, Bolívar’s model has three structural elements, the Lead, Follow, and Valuate, which at the same time structure the contribution and enable it to express an opinion, an evaluation of some situation or conditions in the world of phenomena. In Bolívar’s case the texts analysed happen to be newspaper editorials, in Spanish as well as English and ranging in date from 1711 to the present day, but it is through the LFV structure that evaluation can be seen to emerge. At the same time this structure is not merely linguistic (like the structure of the noun group with its pre- and post- modifiers, a structure which is purely organisational, not related to contextual conditions), but is one which is firmly rooted in and dependent on context, both social and inter-textual. In the case of conference abstracts, which she analyses later in her paper, the LFV structure is still present, if differently organised, since it reflects a different social purpose and context.

Finally, Bolívar’s paper comes to meet that of Edge & Wharton, and Darnton, in that she is concerned to discover how the identification of a text pattern, à la Hoey, may further important pedagogical objectives.